Re: XOrg transition, status of libxaw8
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 03:04:50PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
>
> > libxaw8 is abandoned upstream and there are no plans to fix it for the Xorg7
> > transition. This is a >= serious bug for any package still build-depending
> > on libxaw8-dev, as they FTBFS and this isn't going to be fixed on the xaw8
> > side.
>
> Or, a Debian developer could be solicited who would maintain the
> package. We do not have to be tied to upstream's apron strings so
> rigidly. Just because they drop something doesn't mean we must.
>
> It may even be that MIT Athena will take this over, though I rather
> doubt it.
This library isn't truly abandoned by upstream, but essentially it's not
getting any new development. Cairo is considered the way forward and xprint
is widely (though not universally) considered a broken implementation. Xaw8
is Xaw7 by the way, only with some additional Xprint support that nothing
is really using as of yet. This is why I pinged every single package
maintainer who had a package that depended on xaw8 explicitly, asking them
if they needed it. No one replied in the affirmative, and several people
said explicitly that they didn't. As such, I killed what I see as a useless
library rather than let packages fester around it. If it's truly needed I
can resurrect it, especially now that Drew Parsons has packaged libxp, but
I'd rather not keep additional detrius around the archive if I don't have
to.
If you want to keep it around despite all this, that's your problem.
- David Nusinow
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