Hello Neil, I understand your sadness: making something just compilable from the sources of gtk+extra took me a lot of efforts, mainly due to the lack of upstream development for too long a time.
I agree with you to say that those packages are in a very bad state. However they are still free software, and there are users for ktechlab: at least 300 students in my school do use Ktechlab to study elementary electronics... I know: they did not choose it, and will not make propaganda about it, not before a few years. If you know a better interactive package to use with young students for this purpose, please tell me. Neil Williams a écrit : > I note, with great sadness, that this old chestnut is being dredged up > all over again. The homepage quoted in the .dsc has had no changes > since 2005 and the CVS - even the section under gtk-extra-3/ has had no > changes for 470 days. The package version does not indicate that this > is unreleased software taken directly from CVS. This can be noticed. I can change the package's name. > It's taken me the best part of a YEAR to get gtk+extra2 removed from > unstable I began my work yesterday, when I discovered that "gpsim" was no more buidable in Sid. I did not work one year, I worked just seven hours. During such a short time I did not get such a large insight as you. For example when I browsed quickly the page http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gtk%2Bextra2.html I did not get informations about the year of efforts to get rid of this package. My search was probably too superficial. However the unrewarding hacking to make gtkextra-3 just acceptable gave me at least a little of the sad taste you are expressing. What have been the hardest part to remove gtk+extra2 ? Recoding the interfaces of other packages depending on it ? > (I note a new version of ktechlab in mentors too - updating > ktechlab needs to finally allow the removal of gtk+extra2 from > testing. Personally, I'd be happier for ktechlab to be removed from > Debian than for gtk+extra3 to be inserted to prop up ktechlab.) When I examine the package Ktechlab, I see that it has bindings to libgpsim*, but no binding to gtk+extra. I suppose that the best thing to update ktechlab without reviving gtk+extra, would be to build only libgpsim.so.0 and libgpsim_eXdbm.so.0 from the source package gpsim. None of both libraries depend of gtk+extra. There are only two libraries which depend on libgtk+extra: libgpsimgui.so.0 and libgpsim_modules.so.0; so it would be feasible to build also libgpsim_dspic.so.0 and libgpsimcli.so.0 without reviving gtk+extra. Do you think that such a hack would be easily successful? I suppose that the set of changes in gpsim's source would not be enormous. However I just adopted this package three weeks ago, and I did it only to preserve Ktechlab which depends on it, so my work may not be exactly appreciated by people who use ktechlab for its features concerning PICs. In other words, I am not directly concerned by the features of gpsim and not at all by gtk+extra's feature! But I fear to break too much features maybe used by other people. > Please, I insist that my name is removed from Uploaders before this > package gets into the Debian archive. I refuse to be associated with > it any longer. I had no part in the packaging of this version and I > utterly disown it. I respect your opinion regarding gtk+extra. If you still have some time to write, please send me a few links to the work you dif last year about it, it may improve my insight about what happened. I suppose that you had good reasons, and that they might be taken in account: weakening the output of the source package gpsim would be a good possibility. > At the very least, the package should describe the new upstream > homepage or drop all mention of the old ones and list the new VCS > location because the current ones cannot have been the source of this > package. > > http://gtkextra.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gtkextra/gtkextra-3/gtkextra/?sortby=date#dirlist > (Minimum age of the .c or .h files: 15 months without any change.) > > The long awaited stable port to Gtk+-2.x has been released! > GtkExtra-2.1.1 is now available for download! (06/24/2005) > http://gtkextra.sourceforge.net/ *this* last package is 120 months old :( gtkextra-3 has been maintained longer. I agree with you about the necessity to renew the link to the upstream homepage. I see that in Debian, only two user-level packages depend on gtkextra. Do you know whether there are more user-level packages in that case elsewhere? As my concern is to maintain the package ktechlab, I see no disadvantage if gtkextra is removed from Debian. The main question for me is how to make ktechlab usable with the minimum trouble. Best regards, Georges.
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