Re: Ghostscript orphaned
On 13/02/2023 19:30, Thorsten Alteholz wrote:
Hi Till,
On 13.02.23 11:44, Till Kamppeter wrote:
For me this means that Jonas has dropped maintainership of this
package. Am I right?
yes, you are right.
Thorsten, as Ghostscript is mainly used for printing (rasterizing PDF,
converting PDF to PostScript), it would be great if you could take
maintainership and put it under the Debian Printing Team umbrella.
What do you think?
I have seen this and had hoped that somebody else steps up to maintain
ghostscript. As nobody seems to be interested, yes, the package should
be part of the Printing Team.
Great! Thanks already now.
As I said I am updating the Ubuntu package of Ghostscript currently.
With Jonas it often was not easy to cooperate, when I suggested
something which helped to reduce the delta between the Ubuntu and the
Debian packages he often did not accept my suggestions, he wanted to
have HIS packaging ...
Now I want to ask you whether we could do some better cooperation for
reducing the delta between Debian and Ubuntu.
Especially the big difference between Debian and Ubuntu is that in
Debian all the packages are in one, single repository, but Ubuntu is
devided up in Main and Universe, where Main is the Canonical-supported
core part and Universe are the community-maintained extra applications.
The printing stack is a core part of an operating system, therefore in
Ubuntu the printing stack is in Main. This also means that all
dependencies of the printing stack have to be in Main. This is also
valid for Ghostscript.
To move a package from Universe to Main one has to do a Main Inclusion
Request so that it can be determined whether a package is
well-maintained, fulfills all standards, especially security, for being
covered by commercial support. This is a lot of work, and sometimes it
can take months until Canonical's security team approves a promotion.
Therefore it would be great if we try to maintain together a Ghostscript
package which has a complete functionality but does not take up
dependencies which are in Ubuntu Universe (or not in Ubuntu at all) if
it is not absolutely necessary. As this will hold back updating
Ghostscript in Ubuntu or requiring extra delta as Ubuntu has to apply
different approaches for packaging Ghostscript than Debian. I succeeded
very well with your predecessor Didier Raboud ("OdyX") to eliminate most
of the Debian/Ubuntu delta in all the other printing-related packages.
Improving on Ghostscript would be great now.
Currently, the delta is the following:
- New re-packaging of Ghostscript 10.00.0, keeping the leptonica and
tesseract convenience copies in as they are not in Ubuntu Main.
Added appropriate remark to debian/copyright.
- Just mark all libtesseract symbols optional and be done with it.
They are also arch-specific so causing build failures on non-x86.
- Also keep the lcms2mt convenience copy as it is heavily patched by
Ghostscript's upstream developers, especially for multi-threading
(mt) support.
- Upstream patch (commit 387f094) for the CUPS/PWG/Apple Raster
output device not to match custom page sizes against the sizes
defined in the PPD file, to avoid unwished rotations or size
adjustments. (cups-filters upstream issue #484).
I think with the first 2 we can live very well in general, but the last
2 in the list should actually get into Debian's Ghostscript.
- Debian should use the lcms2mt convenience copy of lcms2, too as it is
heavily adapted to Ghostscript and adds multi-threading.
- The upstream patch is an important fix which I did after the 10.00.0
release of Ghostscript. It is especially important with the new
libcupsfilters 2.x. It is only temporary, in Ghostscript 10.01.0 it
will be included.
I do not actually understand the
Build-Depends-Indep:
python3-sphinx,
python3-sphinx-rtd-theme,
rst2pdf,
in debian/control. Which documentation is generated with this?
Ghostscript is not a Python project.
Till
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