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Re: RFS: lesstif2 AND Questions about collab-maint



I had to let your message sink in....

George Danchev wrote:

> Since it seems you have put so much work and time into that package,
> I guess you deserve at least an honest reply ;-)

Thanks.

> I'm not familiar with the lesstif2 concepts and internals, which 
> doesn't seem to be trivial at all, so I wouldn't be able to properly 
> review and upload, but I think that, in general, before putting 
> considerable amount of work  into whatever neglected or understaffed
> package, it is a good idea to sound the  interest and intentions of
> your prospective sponsors. That might eventually  avoid wasting 
> sponsoree's own time. Otherwise, taking care of such packages is very
> welcome, indeed, so I hope you find a proper sponsor!

I do agree that the internals of lesstif2 are not trivial. However
according to popcon [1] it is a highly popular (if that can be said of a
library), which has received very little attention (both upstream and in
Debian). I am working, albeit slowly, together with the Fedora
maintainer of lesstif2, because he also thinks that the large distro's
should team up to resurrect lesstif. My maintenance work on upstream
(the new release) has been taken up by several distro's, but not by
Debian, where I started to do the work for. I agreed with Sam Hocevar,
the maintainer of lesstif2, that I could co-maintain, but he already
said that I should also seek elsewhere for uploads in case he did not
respond.

Now do I understand correctly that you mean that I should sorta search
for a sponsor in advance? As said, I basically have a sponsor, but he is
not very responsive. Furthermore, my sponsor for Nedit also promised
that he could have a look at it, but apparently he also has different
priorities. For those reasons I am looking on this list as well.

The changes with respect to the previous version of lesstif2 in Debian
are not that big (remember that most changes in upstream are already
applied in the current Debian version) and mainly two things:
"rebootstrapping", ie running
libtoolize/aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake again (script in
debian/patches/000_bootstrap_script.diff) and fixing several obsoleted
macro functions (005_libtool_obsolete.diff).

Next Sunday I will start working with a friend on a problematic part of
lesstif, which is related to bug 545672 [2]. Copy/paste is not very well
implemented and causes strange behavior when a clipboard manager is
working. Now, I don't know much yet about icccm, but we'll try to figure
it out. Apart from helping FOSS, I also consider this a learning
experience for myself, so I do not consider my time waisted.

Paul

[1] http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=lesstif2
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=545672

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