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Re: freehep-graphicsio update



Hi,

Il 21/11/19 12:18, merkys@debian.org ha scritto:
> New version of freehep-graphicsio is out (in 2014 [1]), and I would like
> to see it packaged. However, packaging of freehep-graphicsio is split in
> a dozen of source packages, and update maintaining this split would be
> tedious. Maybe merging the source packages (retaining the upstream
> tarball integrity) would make sense?
I am not against this, but I think I would happily give away maintenance
of these packages. I never used them directly, just needed them as
GeoGebra dependencies.

That said, before updating I would suggest to consider exactly what does
one expects from these packages: do we consider them useful in Debian in
themselves, or do we value them just as reverse dependencies (of
GeoGebra and figtree)? Personally, I don't think they have much value by
themselves; they are unmaintained upstream anyway and I doubt they are
the best Java library for exporting images. Also, the average Java
programmer is more probably going to use them from Maven, Gradle or
whatever dependencies management tool happens to be à la page that month.

As of using them as dependencies, I think upgrading needs some care:
vectorgraphics has been developed in a very discontinuous way lately,
and I believe it could have introduced a lot of API breakages. I think
that at least one package already has GeoGebra-specific patches, because
unfortunately that's how things happen in the Java ecosystem. So I would
suggest whoever wants to upgrade the packages to check carefully that
upgrading is not introducing bugs in GeoGebra and figtree.

These are the reasons why, in the end, I never decided to upgrade. YMMV,
and in this case no problem upgrading the packages, especially if you
can also take maintenance. But please check carefully you are not
breaking rev deps.

Thanks, Giovanni.
-- 
Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani@gmail.com>
Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles

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