Bug#167280: Gift & Giftoxic ITPs
(CC'd to all interested parties including gift ITP and debian-devel
to enumerate reasons for continuing lack of package and re-iterate my
continuing interest and activity)
No, they are not different clients. What I have ITP'd is the work of the
gift project which breaks down into the following:
- giftd, the file-sharing daemon and configuration utilities
- libgift, which allows clients to interoperate with the daemon
- libopenft-gift, the plugin which allows gift to work on the OpenFT
network
I additionally planned to package a front end for giftd, called
giftcurs, to make it useful. It uses ncurses for the frontend and
libgift for the back end to allow you to search and download files on
the OpenFT (or academically, any other network that giftd supports).
Giftoxic is another such front-end to the gift daemon/etc, which you
will notice has not been uploaded to Debian yet. The reasons for this
are the following:
* the OpenFT protocol is not finished. it changes, often incompatibly,
on a very frequent basis.
* the development of the daemon is not finished. bugs are found and
fixed, and features changed daily.
* there have been no stable releases of gift.
* upstream does not want me to upload gift/openft/libgift to unstable
yet because he will not be able to usefully debug problems with
stripped backtraces.
* the project is not ready in software, support or network scalability
terms to have a hoarde of users on the network who do not upgrade on
a daily basis and monitor the IRC channel for important
announcements.
Kindly do not upload any gift-related packages to Debian until these
conditions have changed, *and* I or someone else has packaged and
uploaded the gift daemon, library, plugins and utilities in a suitable
manner (nb, I do not consider the upstream debian/ directory to be at
all suitable). I still intend to finalise and upload my packages of gift
when upstream is agreeable.
Regards,
Rob
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