Hi Roland,
I totally understand your need for a more recent version of the FOX
toolkit. There has been very little upstream activity on the 1.6
("stable") branch in the last few years, and honestly, I don't know
why the 1.7 branch isn't yet considered stable or if/when this will
ever happen.
However, there are a few packages in Debian that depend on the 1.6
branch of FOX, and, without having checked this myself, I would assume
that they won't just work with 1.7 (i.e., someone would have to patch
them). Additionally, some Debian users are probably using the FOX 1.6
development package for their own projects, so I can't just drop 1.6
and move to 1.7.
Instead, one would have to create a new package for the 1.7 branch and
maintain that in parallel to the existing 1.6 package (as far as I can
see, this won't lead to any package name clashes).
The fact that 1.7 is still considered the "development" branch is not
such a big deal in my view, because there are regular releases and the
1.7 branch has existed for quite a long time now. The much larger
practical problem is that I currently don't have the time to package
and maintain the 1.7 branch myself.
I have reassigned your bug report as a RFP (Request For Package) to
the "wnpp" package, because it really doesn't have much to do with the
fox1.6 source package, which I maintain. This way, other people can
see that FOX 1.7 has been requested as a Debian package, and if you're
lucky, someone will come along and package/maintain it.
Even if that happens, it can take a while, though, so your best bet
right now would probably be to package and maintain FOX 1.7 yourself.
I haven't personally attempted this, but I would suspect that the
package would look rather similar to the fox1.6 package, so you could
use this as a basis.
I hope this helps, sorry for not being able to solve your problem
right away!
Best regards,
Fabian
