Re: Debian ships very old software (rplay, paps)

[Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net>]

On Thu, 2025-10-30 at 14:10 -0400, Robert Heller wrote:

At Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:29:21 -0700 Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On Thu, 2025-10-30 at 17:33 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

It is annoying that Debian ships very old software.

For instance:

I wish they WOULD ship some "very old" software. I like xv and xdvi.

Yeah, okular and evince can read dvi files, but they lack some features

like rulers.

I have been building xv from sources without any problems.  I have not had any

reason to use xdvi.  pdflatex => xpdf do what I need to do.

I just now did it. I hadn't been aware of its github. I had an old 32-bit binary that I kept using. I have other 32-bit codes I can't run because Debian no linger includes libXp.

 * rplay, with the latest changes in 1999 and potential

 security issues:

 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug18224

 * paps 0.6.8, while 2 new major versions have been available

 (the current version is 0.8.0). So, in Debian, paps still

 does not honor locales:

 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bugu9331

 (a bug I had reported 11 years ago, with a patch, and

 which was fixed upstream 10 years ago).