Hello, I'm the [passive] upstream maintainer. Just to make things clear:1. grace is perfectly happy using its own copy of t1lib. So you can safely remove the t1lib debian package.
2. Yes, perhaps only 0.34% of all users use it. But same can be said about 90% of the entire debian archive (for each package separately, of course).
3. Yes, it is potentially buggy and insecure. But since in 99.9% you use it within the projects you work yourself on, nothing wrong can happen. In the worst case you loose some time. (And in my experience, grace crashes MUCH less frequently than some high-profile softwares which are really exposed to the Internet.)
4. I have no time and intention right now to switch to freetype. For the scope it is currently used in grace, t1lib is adequate. When I come across a bug, I fix it - that's how the bundled t1lib copy got emerged in the first place.
Best, Evgeny On 23/03/14 12:01, Neil Williams wrote:
On Sun, 23 Mar 2014 11:01:39 +1100 Drew Parsons <dparsons@debian.org> wrote:Grace is one of the most useful packages in the entire archive.... for 0.34% of users of the archive, maybe. To me, it is simply an RC buggy package which has had no new development upstream since 2012 and which depends on an obsolete, abandoned library. Unless it can be ported, it will need to be removed alongside t1lib. Those who care about grace need to scratch their own itch and fix it.I am not aware of anything other package that provides the same degree of functionality. Removing it is not a good idea.Removing it is necessary, as explained. t1lib has been superseded and packages which used to use it need to migrate. The other packages have already done so, those which fail to do so cannot be supported when the underlying dependency has been abandoned.