Re: orphaning psutils
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Jay Berkenbilt writes ("orphaning psutils"):
>> retitle 777699 O: psutils -- PostScript document handling utilities
>> thanks
>>
>> I'm going to go ahead and orphan these. The RFA has been open for a long
>> time, and the package has not been adopted yet. I didn't actually notice
>> that someone else had changed this to O and then it got changed back
>> recently until just now, but this is RFA -> O filed by the current
>> maintainer, and I'm about to follow this up by uploading an orphaned
>> package.
>>
>> If Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>, who had previously
>> indicated a willingness to adopt the package, would still be interested
>> in adopting the package, he should of course do so. Otherwise, I suppose
>> this is ready to be adopted by anyone else who wants to maintain it.
>> Thanks.
>
> I have subscribed to the package in the PTS. I have indeed not yet
> got round to doing a maintainer upload. Neither have I found time to
> look in detail at the outstanding bugs to try to debug them. OTOH the
> package is not in terribly bad shape.
Ian, thanks for looking after it even without picking it up. You're
right -- the package is in decent shape. I've fixed all the major issues
with it, and there haven't been any new ones for a while. Most of the
outstanding bugs are either requests for functionality, bugs that are
upstream bugs and require deeper knowledge of the code to fix (the
package is dead upstream), or problems that seem related to other
systems generating PostScript that doesn't match what psutils is
expecting. Mostly these bugs should probably just be closed. Now-a-days,
PDF is in more common use for the kinds of things that psutils used to
be used for, and it's a better format than PostScript for this anyway
because there are clean and predictable ways to work with it. psutils
works by working with encapsulated postscript document structuring
comments, which is only reliable if the underlying document uses them
properly. Most don't. When people have big problems psutils, my general
advice to them is to use something like ps2pdf from ghostscript to
convert to PDF and then do the manipulations in PDF. Before psutils went
more or less completely idle upstream, I had coordinated with the author
to merge in some of the debian patches. The Debian psutils package has a
few added utilities that are not technically part of psutils but kind of
fit functionally into the package. The psmerge in our psutils package is
not the actual upstream psmerge at all but a perl script that depends on
ghostscript. At one point, I studied the Fedora package and tried to get
some convergence, but I don't think that went anywhere.
> If someone else wants to pick it up then they are very welcome.
>
> Otherwise I am still interested in the package and will certainly at
> least fix any RC bugs it may acquire.
Feel free to contact me any time if you have questions. This goes for
anyone else who may pick up the package as well.
--
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>
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