Hello debian-devel, This is my first post in this mailing list. I'm the maintainer of the upstream PoDoFo library[1], and I'm here to discuss the situation of the podofo library in Debian. The libpodofo package[2] in Debian hasn't seen a major update since May 2022. Since then, three major upstream updates have been released: 0.10 in 2023, 1.0 in 2025 and 1.1 in 2026. 0.10.x and 1.0.x received updates until May 1st 2026 and are now deprecated, with 1.1.x selected as the new LTS series.
We were in contact with the Debian/Ubuntu maintainer for a period and I hoped a newer release of PoDoFo in Debian was just a matter of time. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened. Because of the enduring situation, I want to make a clear statement about the status about the version of the PoDoFo distributed now in Debian: - The 0.9.x series has not received an update since 0.9.8 and has been effectively deprecated. No previous upstream maintainer stepped in to support it so it's also unmaintained; - The PoDoFo tools have been indefinitely declared[3] unsupported and unmaintained. I leave the decision on how to proceed to the Debian developers. If a new Debian maintainer steps in to create 1.1 packages, I'd like to add a couple of notes to help with the integration: - As stated the new license is LGPL2+ or MPL 2.0 for the source code. However, with the default enabled "Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType" integration (Apache2 licensed) the library is not compatible with GPL2-only software as a whole. The integration allows for Type1 font subsetting so I generally don't recommend disabling it; - I'm establishing a "no package patches" policy in PoDoFo, meaning that all reasonable features needed by packagers should be available by default in PoDoFo upstream. If you need a feature/fix, just ask for it; - The deprecated PoDoFo tools still compile, but are opt-in enabled. At some point they may be reinstated, but not in the short term. Feel free to ask if you need any further information. Best, Francesco [1] https://github.com/podofo/podofo [2] https://packages.debian.org/source/stable/libpodofo [3] https://github.com/podofo/podofo#podofo-tools
