Bug#673459: RFP: Gofish -- Small gopher server in C

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Martin Ebnoether <ventilator@semmel.ch> writes:

> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
>
> * Package name    : gofish
>   Version         : 1.2
>   Upstream Author : Sean MacLennan
> * URL or Web page : http://gofish.sourceforge.net/
> * License         : GPL
>   Description     : Small gopher server in C
>
> GoFish is a very simple gopher/web server. It is designed with
> security, performance. and low resource usage in mind.

There was a GoFish package in the archive a long long time ago, but it
was removed because better alternatives (pygopherd) existed at the time.

I quickly had a look at the current gofish, and well, I wasn't really
impressed. The git tree[1] contains generated files, for one thing, and
the upstream released tarball contains things like config.log and
config.status.

The last release was in 2010, though the git repository shows activity
as recent as ~5 months ago, so it's not all that bad.

But the quality of the tarball leaves something to be desired, and
whoever ends up packaging it, will have to either repackage it, or
better, convince upstream to do a make dist release instead.

On the other hand: what changed since 2004 (I think...) when GoFish was
removed from Debian? How is it better than pygohperd? Apart from being
written in C, that is. I understand one could put this on a router or
something, but.. whatever has space enough for a basic debian install,
will very likely have enough space for python too.

And in all honesty, gopher performance should not matter much, either. I
find it unlikely that more than a handful of people would ever try to
access the same server at any given time.

 [1]: http://git.seanm.ca/?p=gofish;a=tree

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