discuss: Debian LinuxDoc is no longer unmaintained (sort of)
Subject:
Re: [discuss] Debian LinuxDoc is no longer unmaintained (sort of)
From:
####@####.#### (Andrew M.A. Cater)
Date:
3 Dec 2006 21:31:58 -0000
Message-Id: <20061203212837.GA10918@galactic.demon.co.uk>
On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 01:17:24AM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
> The maintainer for Debian's LinuxDoc tools disappeared a few years ago
> and I thought that it was no longer maintained. But checking Debian's
> website shows that several bugs have been fixed in the past few years.
> They were fixed by "non-maintainer uploads" by various persons other
> than the maintainer. So it's good to know that even though it doesn't
> have a maintainer (or at least not an active one), it is being
> maintained sporadically, which is certainly better than no maintenance
> at all.
>
David,
If I'm reading it correctly, it's now maintained by the Debian QA team.
They pick up dead/orphaned packages and do a maintenance job for them.
It's quite possible that no-one actually wants to maintain an
independent linuxdoc package anymore but that it's sufficiently
stable that maintenance takes relatively effort.
> There are some significant improvements that are needed to make
> LinuxDoc easier to use which remain to be implemented by someone. For
> example, you shouldn't need to specify typewriter fonts for a verbatim
> environment. It should be the default. And plain text output should
> also be the default when you ask for text output, not text with
> embedded escape sequences for highlighting emphasized text on a VT100
> terminal, etc. Well, I suppose it could use **emphasis** for
> emphasis and it would still be plain text.
>
Fixes / improvements are another matter. I doubt that these will happen
quickly. Hope this helps explain matters as I understand them.
Andy
> David Lawyer
