Up for adoption: ctags and expat

Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Warren Young]

I’m the current maintainer of these two packages.  As it happens,
I have never seriously used either under Cygwin.  I only adopted
ctags because it was abandoned in 2003 and was in danger of being
removed from the distribution after repeated attempts to contact its
maintainer in 2005 failed.  Since I do use ctags on other platforms,
I decided that I was at least in a position to keep it in Cygwin,
so I adopted it.  The situation was less drastic with expat: I simply
took over the package’s maintenance when Brian Dessent stepped down
in 2008.

The time has come for someone else to maintain these packages.

But not just anyone.  I do not want to drop another twig onto the
back of someone who’s already carrying a lot for the Cygwin project.
I’d prefer that these packages to go to someone who’s been looking
to jump into Cygwin package maintainership, and has just been waiting
for an excuse. 

These two are a mixed bag when it comes to ease of maintainership, 
each for very different reasons.

The easy part with ctags is that there hasn’t been an upstream 
release since 2009, and there is no reason to expect that there will 
be another.  The hard part is that the shipped Makefile doesn’t
understand how to do out-of-tree builds, something Cygport expects
to be able to do, so I had to write a custom build script to produce 
the current packages, which might have to be adjusted by the next
maintainer of this package, if a new version comes out with the same
primitive build system. 

As for expat, the easy part is that it builds out of the box under
Cygport, and I’ve already worked out the .cygport file for you, so a
new maintainer should have a very easy time with that part of the job.
The only difficult bit is that there has been a recent flurry of 
security patches to it, which makes building it more difficult than 
if you were just building from upstream release tarballs.  That said, 
it’s been a while since the last one, so maybe this is the beginning 
of another of the long lulls expat seems to go into.

If no such person steps up, I will stay on as maintainer.

Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Doug Henderson]

On 11 August 2016 at 17:49, Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com> wrote:
> I’m the current maintainer of these two packages.  As it happens,

> The time has come for someone else to maintain these packages.

I am willing to take over as maintainer of the ctags and expat packages.

Doug


-- 
Doug Henderson, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Corinna Vinschen]

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On Aug 11 17:49, Warren Young wrote:
> I’m the current maintainer of these two packages.  As it happens,
> I have never seriously used either under Cygwin.  I only adopted
> ctags because it was abandoned in 2003 and was in danger of being
> removed from the distribution after repeated attempts to contact its
> maintainer in 2005 failed.  Since I do use ctags on other platforms,
> I decided that I was at least in a position to keep it in Cygwin,
> so I adopted it.  The situation was less drastic with expat: I simply
> took over the package’s maintenance when Brian Dessent stepped down
> in 2008.
> 
> The time has come for someone else to maintain these packages.
> 
> But not just anyone.  I do not want to drop another twig onto the
> back of someone who’s already carrying a lot for the Cygwin project.
> I’d prefer that these packages to go to someone who’s been looking
> to jump into Cygwin package maintainership, and has just been waiting
> for an excuse. 
> 
> These two are a mixed bag when it comes to ease of maintainership, 
> each for very different reasons.
> 
> The easy part with ctags is that there hasn’t been an upstream 
> release since 2009, and there is no reason to expect that there will 
> be another.  The hard part is that the shipped Makefile doesn’t
> understand how to do out-of-tree builds, something Cygport expects
> to be able to do, so I had to write a custom build script to produce 
> the current packages, which might have to be adjusted by the next
> maintainer of this package, if a new version comes out with the same
> primitive build system. 

Given the obvious lack of upstream development, did anybody try
to replace exuberant ctags with universal ctags?

  https://ctags.io/

I noticed that our co-maintainer Frank Fesevur is involved in this
project.  Frank, any insight?


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Frank Fesevur]

2016-08-12 10:11 GMT+02:00 Corinna Vinschen:
> Given the obvious lack of upstream development, did anybody try
> to replace exuberant ctags with universal ctags?
>
>   https://ctags.io/
>
> I noticed that our co-maintainer Frank Fesevur is involved in this
> project.  Frank, any insight?

I have been active in the development of universal ctags, but at the
moment not too much.

Universal ctags is the continuation of exuberant ctags. We have tried
to convince Darren Hiebert (the original author of exuberant) to team
up so we could keep the name. But that didn't work out, so we had to
fork and came up with the name universal.

My main reason to help out was to make sure it kept working on native
Windows. I use ctags for a Notepad++ plugin I wrote.

I have successfully compile universal ctags for cygwin a while ago and
it worked. Not sure how it is at the moment. There have been some
changes in the build files so not sure if cygwin still works. Pull
request are always reviewed.

Among many other improvements, universal ctags has more and better
parsers. You can add your own parser with an external program or with
regexs. You can write the output as JSON.

There hasn't been any official release. ATM there is no-one working on
that. Making all the docs up-to-date with all the development that has
been going on is the biggest task.

I would say, make the switch to universal. I am willing to maintain
that package. Question is how to update a package without official
releases. And it hasn't been included in any major distro AFAIK.

Regards,
Frank

Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Corinna Vinschen]

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On Aug 12 11:01, Frank Fesevur wrote:
> 2016-08-12 10:11 GMT+02:00 Corinna Vinschen:
> > Given the obvious lack of upstream development, did anybody try
> > to replace exuberant ctags with universal ctags?
> >
> >   https://ctags.io/
> >
> > I noticed that our co-maintainer Frank Fesevur is involved in this
> > project.  Frank, any insight?
> 
> I have been active in the development of universal ctags, but at the
> moment not too much.
> 
> Universal ctags is the continuation of exuberant ctags. We have tried
> to convince Darren Hiebert (the original author of exuberant) to team
> up so we could keep the name. But that didn't work out, so we had to
> fork and came up with the name universal.

Pity.

> My main reason to help out was to make sure it kept working on native
> Windows. I use ctags for a Notepad++ plugin I wrote.
> 
> I have successfully compile universal ctags for cygwin a while ago and
> it worked. Not sure how it is at the moment. There have been some
> changes in the build files so not sure if cygwin still works. Pull
> request are always reviewed.
> 
> Among many other improvements, universal ctags has more and better
> parsers. You can add your own parser with an external program or with
> regexs. You can write the output as JSON.
> 
> There hasn't been any official release. ATM there is no-one working on
> that. Making all the docs up-to-date with all the development that has
> been going on is the biggest task.
> 
> I would say, make the switch to universal. I am willing to maintain
> that package. Question is how to update a package without official
> releases. And it hasn't been included in any major distro AFAIK.

You could start with a test build and set the version numbers in the
setup.hint file explicitely.  If it works out fine, you only have to
keep up with the prev/curr markers as long as "prev" is the exuberant 
package.  Question is, *are* there any version numbers yet?  If not,
you could use git commit IDs for the time being.


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Frank Fesevur]

2016-08-12 12:19 GMT+02:00 Corinna Vinschen:
> On Aug 12 11:01, Frank Fesevur wrote:
>> Universal ctags is the continuation of exuberant ctags. We have tried
>> to convince Darren Hiebert (the original author of exuberant) to team
>> up so we could keep the name. But that didn't work out, so we had to
>> fork and came up with the name universal.
>
> Pity.

Absolutely.

>> I would say, make the switch to universal. I am willing to maintain
>> that package. Question is how to update a package without official
>> releases. And it hasn't been included in any major distro AFAIK.
>
> You could start with a test build and set the version numbers in the
> setup.hint file explicitely.  If it works out fine, you only have to
> keep up with the prev/curr markers as long as "prev" is the exuberant
> package.  Question is, *are* there any version numbers yet?  If not,
> you could use git commit IDs for the time being.

There is no version number yet. The expectation is it will become 6.0
so something like 5.9-date-shorthash could a temporary version number
for a test release. The compile date and hash are shown when "ctags
--version" is invoked.

I just tried and the basic compilation of the current master branch works.

Regards,
Frank

BTW. Did you know that a coworker of you is the lead developer of
universal ctags? https://github.com/masatake

Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Corinna Vinschen]

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On Aug 12 15:41, Frank Fesevur wrote:
> 2016-08-12 12:19 GMT+02:00 Corinna Vinschen:
> > On Aug 12 11:01, Frank Fesevur wrote:
> >> Universal ctags is the continuation of exuberant ctags. We have tried
> >> to convince Darren Hiebert (the original author of exuberant) to team
> >> up so we could keep the name. But that didn't work out, so we had to
> >> fork and came up with the name universal.
> >
> > Pity.
> 
> Absolutely.
> 
> >> I would say, make the switch to universal. I am willing to maintain
> >> that package. Question is how to update a package without official
> >> releases. And it hasn't been included in any major distro AFAIK.
> >
> > You could start with a test build and set the version numbers in the
> > setup.hint file explicitely.  If it works out fine, you only have to
> > keep up with the prev/curr markers as long as "prev" is the exuberant
> > package.  Question is, *are* there any version numbers yet?  If not,
> > you could use git commit IDs for the time being.
> 
> There is no version number yet. The expectation is it will become 6.0
> so something like 5.9-date-shorthash could a temporary version number
> for a test release. The compile date and hash are shown when "ctags
> --version" is invoked.
> 
> I just tried and the basic compilation of the current master branch works.

Cool!  If you want to take over ctags and test universal ctags for
Cygwin, feel free if Warren agrees.  I'll change over maintainership
then.

Warren, does that sound good to you?

Doug, I hope you don't feel overlooked.  Expat is still yours if
Warren has no problems with that.

> BTW. Did you know that a coworker of you is the lead developer of
> universal ctags? https://github.com/masatake

Huh, no, I didn't.  I doubt he wants to become Cygwin package
maintainer, though :)


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Warren Young]

On Aug 12, 2016, at 7:57 AM, Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Cool!  If you want to take over ctags and test universal ctags for
> Cygwin, feel free if Warren agrees.  I'll change over maintainership
> then.
> 
> Warren, does that sound good to you?
> 
> Doug, I hope you don't feel overlooked.  Expat is still yours if
> Warren has no problems with that.

Sounds like a plan.

Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Doug Henderson]

On 12 August 2016 at 11:57, Warren Young wrote:
> On Aug 12, 2016, at 7:57 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>
>>
>> Cool!  If you want to take over ctags and test universal ctags for
>> Cygwin, feel free if Warren agrees.  I'll change over maintainership
>> then.
>>
>> Warren, does that sound good to you?
>>
>> Doug, I hope you don't feel overlooked.  Expat is still yours if
>> Warren has no problems with that.
>
> Sounds like a plan.

Sound good to me. Right now I am between contracts/jobs, so I have a
little more free time than usual. What should a new maintainer do now,
pending upstream announcement of new releases or security patches?

Doug

-- 
Doug Henderson, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Corinna Vinschen]

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On Aug 12 11:57, Warren Young wrote:
> On Aug 12, 2016, at 7:57 AM, Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Cool!  If you want to take over ctags and test universal ctags for
> > Cygwin, feel free if Warren agrees.  I'll change over maintainership
> > then.
> > 
> > Warren, does that sound good to you?
> > 
> > Doug, I hope you don't feel overlooked.  Expat is still yours if
> > Warren has no problems with that.
> 
> Sounds like a plan.

I added Frank as ctags maintainer to cygwin-pkg-maint but didn't remove
you for the time being until the move over is complete.


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Corinna Vinschen]

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On Aug 12 13:01, Doug Henderson wrote:
> On 12 August 2016 at 11:57, Warren Young wrote:
> > On Aug 12, 2016, at 7:57 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Cool!  If you want to take over ctags and test universal ctags for
> >> Cygwin, feel free if Warren agrees.  I'll change over maintainership
> >> then.
> >>
> >> Warren, does that sound good to you?
> >>
> >> Doug, I hope you don't feel overlooked.  Expat is still yours if
> >> Warren has no problems with that.
> >
> > Sounds like a plan.
> 
> Sound good to me. Right now I am between contracts/jobs, so I have a
> little more free time than usual. What should a new maintainer do now,
> pending upstream announcement of new releases or security patches?

Maybe you could make yourself familiar with cygport and how to build
the expat package.  You should also read

https://cygwin.com/setup.html and
https://sourceware.org/cygwin-apps/package-upload.html


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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