[OpenIndiana-discuss] Heads-Up: Obsoletion of 39 old packages

[Matthew R. Trower]

On 1/10/24 03:33, Marcel Telka wrote:

> Since nobody cared so far for many many years it looks obvious that
> these pacakges are abandoned, unused, rotted.

That doesn't follow.  I use vi daily, yet you could stop updating it for 
20 years and I wouldn't notice or care, so long as it was still 
distributed.  Great age does not necessarily mean a package is unused, 
or even necessarily rotted.  Another person has already said he uses mtx.
> Our current jedit package is at version 4.3.  This version was released
> upstream 14 years ago.  Since 4.3 there were about 15 new releases
> upstream.  The latest one is 5.6.0 released on September 2020.

In particular, JEdit being a java program, makes it even less likely to 
need maintenance to continue to function.

> The current jedit package is distributed (at least partly) under GPLv2.
> This means that OpenIndiana should provide sources and build recipes for
> the package.  We do not have that, so it looks like we violate the
> license (IANAL).  We should stop.

Sun has a history of dual-licensing stuff, but... looking around at the 
files, I think you are correct.  We're probably in violation of the GPL; 
  I guess we'd better do something about that.

> If you or somebody else believe we should keep any of them then
> somebody needs to sit down and create build recipes for them.  This
> needs labor and time somebody needs to invest.
I'll have a look at getting JEdit, dwdiff, ROXTerm and pen packaged up. 
iozone is not GPL, but I can look at it as well.


>> I wonder why we don't?
> 
> Why we don't what?

I wonder why we don't have source in our build system.  Sun didn't 
publish sources for some components because they couldn't get licenses, 
but that shouldn't have been the case here.  It's just idle speculation 
on my part, don't worry about it.


-- Matthew R. Trower