From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 63433 invoked by alias); 11 Aug 2016 23:49:29 -0000 Mailing-List: contact cygwin-apps-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk Sender: cygwin-apps-owner@cygwin.com List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Mail-Followup-To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com Received: (qmail 63422 invoked by uid 89); 11 Aug 2016 23:49:29 -0000 Authentication-Results: sourceware.org; auth=none X-Virus-Found: No X-Spam-SWARE-Status: No, score=1.2 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,KAM_LAZY_DOMAIN_SECURITY,RP_MATCHES_RCVD autolearn=no version=3.3.2 spammy=brian, Brian, adoption, danger X-HELO: etr-usa.com Received: from etr-usa.com (HELO etr-usa.com) (130.94.180.135) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.93/v0.84-503-g423c35a) with ESMTP; Thu, 11 Aug 2016 23:49:28 +0000 Received: (qmail 53053 invoked by uid 13447); 11 Aug 2016 23:49:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO polypore.west.etr-usa.com) ([73.26.17.49]) (envelope-sender ) by 130.94.180.135 (qmail-ldap-1.03) with AES256-SHA encrypted SMTP for ; 11 Aug 2016 23:49:26 -0000 From: Warren Young Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Up for adoption: ctags and expat Message-Id: <8B595AA4-99A0-4497-9D8B-AF27D79B28A0@etr-usa.com> Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2016 23:49:00 -0000 To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 9.3 \(3124\)) X-IsSubscribed: yes X-SW-Source: 2016-08/txt/msg00041.txt.bz2 I=E2=80=99m 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=E2=80=99s 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=E2=80=99s already carrying a lot for the Cygwin project. I=E2=80=99d prefer that these packages to go to someone who=E2=80=99s been = looking to jump into Cygwin package maintainership, and has just been waiting for an excuse.=20 These two are a mixed bag when it comes to ease of maintainership,=20 each for very different reasons. The easy part with ctags is that there hasn=E2=80=99t been an upstream=20 release since 2009, and there is no reason to expect that there will=20 be another. The hard part is that the shipped Makefile doesn=E2=80=99t 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=20 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.=20 As for expat, the easy part is that it builds out of the box under Cygport, and I=E2=80=99ve 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=20 security patches to it, which makes building it more difficult than=20 if you were just building from upstream release tarballs. That said,=20 it=E2=80=99s been a while since the last one, so maybe this is the beginnin= g=20 of another of the long lulls expat seems to go into. If no such person steps up, I will stay on as maintainer.