Hi all! I have recently took over maintenance (both in upstream and downstream) of xmlto package.
After going through what's needed and learning more about the package, we have figured that there is a piece of software called 'xmlif' bundled with the xmlto software (not only the package) and compiled with the xmlto. Problem is that the original creator and neither of the maintainers really made that piece of software and after a bit of more research it seems that 'xmlif' has its own upstream which seems to be somewhat active (latest commit 9 months ago). https://gitlab.com/esr/xmlif After further discussion, it doesn't really make sense to have the source code of xmlif duplicated in codebase of xmlto when there is active upstream of xmlif itself. I'd love to remove the xmlif part of xmlto, but there are two problematic parts with doing so. Afaik, xmlif is not packaged in fedora (nor other distributions like Arch) in itself and since it is not really a dependency of xmlto (but just somewhat related to each other from what I have learned) I don't know whether anyone actually depends on having xmlif in Fedora - meaning I don't know whether I should create and maintain new xmlif package *before* removing it from xmlto. Secondly, based on xmlif readme in upstream, the xmlto package is shipping an outdated version of xmlif, which also seems to be breaking XML language standards. This, *I think* would also mean, that just shipping up to date xmlif might break something that depends on the older version. From my POV, both issues could be resolved by just shipping changes to rawhide and proactively resolving potential issues, while this change is limited only to rawhide. Ideally, if any of you have any other ideas or specific instances where you use xmlif from xmlto package, I'd love to hear about them and act accordingly. Or possibly cases where you needed the newer xmlif version and had to deal with getting it manually. I have also contacted the Eric. S. Raymond (the developer of xmlif) multiple times via an E-mail in span of like a month with request for what would be his preferred way of attacking this issue. None of my E-mails got a response, so I'm trying to ask here before touching the package. Thank you all for reading this long message, hope you have an amazing day, Ales -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
