[tex-live] psutils maintenance

Dr. Werner Fink werner at suse.de
Mon Dec 17 10:58:14 CET 2012


Hi,

just one remark: do you have announced this also to the TeXLive upstream.
This because they using also some sort of patches.  Maybe it would help
to use only one upstream line.  Beside this I've a patch around written
by Stanislav Brabec which allows page flipping (i.e. mirroring) with pstops.

       Werner

On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 10:46:12PM +0000, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> Please take a look at a prospective 1.20 release at:
> 
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/51685587/psutils-1.20.tar.gz
> 
> The main changes are as follows:
> 
> All Debian patches applied (this also covers Fedora as far as I can tell).
> 
> All fix* scripts removed (they all seem to be way out of date).
> 
> getafm and showchar removed (these don't seem really to be to do with the
> purpose of psutils, namely manipulating PostScript files, and there are
> better ways to achieve the same jobs).
> 
> The remaining code (C & Perl) has been overhauled to use and take account
> of compiler warnings and reduce the code size. libpaper is now required for
> the C code, and Ghostscript for psmerge.
> 
> The code has been autoconfiscated, making building easier and more
> portable. The old Makefiles have been removed.
> 
> All platform-specific code has been removed. I'm assuming no-one's that
> interested in running on DOS any more, and Windows is covered by autotools
> plus the various Windows POSIX layers.
> 
> The scripts and man pages are no longer generated. I've added psutils(1)
> for a simple overview of the suite.
> 
> The code is at:
> 
> https://github.com/rrthomas/psutils
> 
> Comments/bug reports welcome (please if possible file bugs in the issue
> tracker at the above URL).
> 
> 
> On 13 December 2012 14:55, Reuben Thomas <rrt at sc3d.org> wrote:
> 
> > On 12 December 2012 12:55, Jay Berkenbilt <qjb at debian.org> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Thank you.  You're right that psutils could really use a new upstream.
> >> It's an important and widely-used package.  I wish you full success with
> >> this.  I have no problem switching debian's psutils distribution to
> >> what you're doing.
> >>
> >
> > That's good to hear!
> >
> >
> >> I was going to suggest that you take a look at all the debian bug
> >> reports for psutils.  I am a bit behind on these and haven't studied all
> >> of them.  Some are just documentation fixes, while others include
> >> patches.  I haven't validated the patches yet though I intended to.
> >> Here's the link for all the debian bug reports.
> >>
> >> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=psutils
> >>
> >
> > Thanks. Since I too have "no time" to do this, I propose to accept patches
> > only when they have been accepted by distros. That is, I don't have time to
> > learn the code base and validate patches myself. My general policy when
> > maintaining packages is to only accept patches
> >
> >
> >> Also, I'm sure you're aware of all the
> >> distributions having recently removed a file with an apple copyright
> >> from the distribution.
> >>
> >
> > Yes, and I've removed those files too.
> >
> >
> >> Have you tried contacting the author?  Last time I talked to him was a
> >> few years ago.  At the time, he was working on psutils 2.0 but didn't
> >> seem to think he would ever finish it.  He might be happy to hand over
> >> the reins, or of course, this could just be a fork.
> >>
> >
> > I have, but only for bug reports (haven't had a reply in five years). I'll
> > try writing to him specifically about the fork (for example, he might want
> > to contribute the current state of a 2.0 version as a branch).
> >
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org


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