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Re: Provide libijs packages as a binary package of Ghostscript?



On 01/24/2011 08:47 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
Hi Till (and others),

I took the liberty of moving this conversation to the Debian Printing
Team and cc ijs package maintainer.


OK, good idea.


I dislike treating Ghostscript as source of multiple libraries!


I prefer having each upstream source tarball which exists entering the distribution only once. With this principle replacing the upstream tarball by a newer version is easy. Replaced at this one point where it enters it is replaced for the whole distro. It cannot happen that one forgets the other places then.

If the tarball contains the source for several binary packages, it should generate all these binaries as separate binary packages.

If a certain piece of source code exists more than once upstream, it must be checked carefully, which version is the one which is actively maintained. Only this version should be used.

I think that a) ijs package should cherry-pick from ghostscript sources
(manually, from upstream tarballs and/or VCS), and b) ijs package
maintainers (or anyone, really - perhaps yourself?) verify if current
ijs upstream truly is dead or have sane reason to not adopt what is
currently shipped with ghostscript.

I am the maintainer of the OpenPrinting web site and no one asked for write access to the IJS page when the site got moved to a new server mid-2006. So from then on it is definitely not maintained any more on the OpenPrinting web site.

The Ghostscript maintainers did small changes (bug fixes, make it build under Windows, ...). As only they do maintenance work on it I am fine with the maintained source code of IJS being the ijs/ directory of Ghostscript. The IJS web page on OpenPrinting clearly tells that the officially maintained source code is in Ghostscript.

When those options are tried, we can
discuss if perhaps we shoulf try convince Ghostscript developers to
release their library as separate tarballs.


So please ask them via IRC, channel #ghostscript on Freenode or report a bug/feature request (product: Ghostscript, component: printer driver) on http://bugs.ghostscript.com/. If IJS does not get separated my suggesstion for best maintainability is to let the libijs* packages being binary packages of the ghostscript source package.

As a related note, I recommend ijs package maintainer to join the Debian
Printing Team to ease coordination like this. :-)


If this email conversation itself does not cause action from ijs package
maintainers, I suggest filing a bugreport against ijs to formally raise
awareness on those sources supposedly lacking behind. Ideally with those
same recommendations as I suggest above, but if you do the bugfiling
then obviously you get to influence in what direction you prefer ;-)

OK.

   Till


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