Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote: > So basically the package has been unmaintained all these years, and > still is. Sorry that your patches were ignored, but it seems that the > maintainers are simply not available, and the rest of the Debian folks > don't always take a look to packages unless they are interested in it > for some reason.
Sorry for my late reply, I was busy with other stuff ... > I just uploaded another NMU fixing other problems (related with > cross-compilation, because it affects other packages), and considered > including some of your patches, but they are a bit complex (it not just > a fix initialising a variable, or avoiding a leak, etc), Actually the first part of my patch is -- but the rest isn't. :) > and nobody else > "seconded" the change (I'm CCing other addressed of the authors) or > asked for the patches to be applied, or pointed that the patch is > already battle-tested because it's shipped in new upstream releases... > > Essentially, I have very little knowledge about the matter at hand and I > am not interested in maintaining the package long term, so without > investing a significant amount of time and effort I don't know what's > currently wrong with the behaviour, how to test it with the available > packages using the library (or if I have to create a sample program to > test the new features of the fonts to rotate them, for example), I included some test programs with the changes (see below). > I don't > know either if they will break applications relying on the current > behaviour (even if possibly buggy), That's certainly possible. If bug-compatibility is important, we basically can't change anything, and I'll have to keep my fixes to myself. > I cannot evaluate if you're > introducing errors in the package as part of a mistake or a nefarious > plan... Of course I am. ;> > and even then, the fixes will be only applied in Debian (and > possibly derivatives), with behaviour possibly diverging from other > platforms. Of course, I'd like the bugs fixed upstream. My understanding (many years ago when I reported the bugs) was that I should not send a copy to the upstream software maintainers myself, as it is possible that the bug exists only in Debian. If necessary, the maintainer of the package will forward the bug upstream. Incidentally, that's still what it says today on https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting (my text is almost a verbatim quote!). I've had those irritations with many other bug reports I've made on Debian, and I still don't know what's going on. Is the page about bug reporting buggy itself? Should we report upstream now? Then again, the last upstream release is from 2013, so this might be futile, too. > (This also happened in the past with SDL packages in Debian for example, > which contained patches not applied upstream for years changing > important things about the behaviour). So why weren't they forwarded upstream? Because nobody cared? > Now, what I can offer is that if you are interested in the package, want > to take responsability for the changes, and want to fix the problems in > the long term (including maybe switching to the fork in github, which > seems more lively), I will ask you to prepare a new upload fixing these > and maybe other problems, and will then try to help and sponsor your > changes. > > Does it sound interesting? I wasn't aware of the github fork, thanks for mentioning it. So as I see it, the original version is dead. (Original authors who are included int he discussion may feel free to contradict me.) This also concerns me WRT long-term viability. At the moment, I'm using X and OpenGL, but at some point I'll probably (have to) switch to Wayland and Vulkan or whatever, and a maintained library has a better chance to make the switch, I hope. I've tried it now. I see one of my bugs (3.) is already fixed there (independently), another one (incorrect blending function) has been obsoleted by moving it to the caller (I'm fine with that). So for the other 4 bugs (and 1 new one I found while testing), I guess my best chances are to offer my patches as pull requests on github. I'm doing that now. If/when they are accepted, you might consider uploading that version to Debian. Until then, a Debian upload of the old version with my fixes seems like a waste of time. (I've been using a patched packages for many years now anyway, nobody else seems interested, and as you said, it would only fix the issues in Debian.) Regards, Frank
