Re: Provide libijs packages as a binary package of Ghostscript?
On 01/25/2011 09:48 PM, Roger Leigh wrote:
Just for the record, I think there should be *one* copy of ijs only.
I really don't care whether it's in ijs or gs. However, given that
gs is required for ijs to work, and the copy in gs has had some
maintenance, I think the gs copy would be the better choice (providing
it can be made usable for others). They are probably the effective
upstream maintainers of the code in any case given the complete lack
of upstream ijs activity for years. [The upstream were the gs
maintainers (more or less) in any case.]
I agree with that, each piece of source code should go into the distro
once, and if possible there should also not be any duplication of binary
code.
I did try to hack on getting gs to do this back in 2002, but gs was so
baroque I couldn't make any headway. If it's easy to get the gs build
system to build and link with a shared lib, and generate the .pc file,
that would be great. It just needs someone familiar with gs.
The GS upstream developers are currently working on the ijs/
subdirectory and its build system, to at least accept an external shared
libijs on demand by ./configure option or on absence of the ijs/
directory. I could also ask them to add support for the scenario of
building the shared libijs from the code in the ijs/ directory and
making Ghostscript using it.
(I remember the horror of when gutenprint (then gimpprint) was also
embedded wholesale in the gs tree as gdevstp; it was imported
regularly from our CVS, and it make it hard to develop since it was
so fragile and we had to make sure our Makefiles stayed compatible
with the gs tree. IJS was a Godsend since it allowed us to be
entirely separate.) IMO the wholesale embedding of stuff in gs is a
symptom of wider issues in gs (the number of embedded drivers is
horrifying--they should all have been made modular years back, which
would prevent stupid stuff like having to have gs linked with X etc.).
I have opened student projects in the Google Summer of Code for
modularizing the drivers but never found students to actually do that.
Especially I would like to see a modularization that one can bolt GS'
drivers also on Poppler.
Have there been any gs issues related to ijs? AFAICT, they directly
copied the IJS sources files straight into their tree, so any issues
should be present in both packages.
No issues known to me. GS devs copied over IJS code once (years ago),
then they did some fixes. No code got copied back to OpenPrinting and
Ghostscrit's code got considered the official one. Note that Ghostscript
generally includes the source code of all used libraries into the GS
tree to make it compilable and debuggable under Windows.
Till
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