Sorry to hear you've removed ivtools from the Debian distribution.
I would like to point out a few things that might make you
reconsider. First off, although Guenter Geiger made a request for
someone else to adapt the package more than 8 years ago, the latest
packages were from a 2008 release of the source (ivtools-1.2.6).
People have been investing their time to try and keep this software up
to date with the constantly evolving Debian guidelines and gcc
compiler versions. Casually tossing out it on a single request seems
to merit a little more justification than simply the date of an intent-
to-orphan request and a popularity metric. If there is some
fundamental problem with the source code or packaging that can not be
fixed with an NMU it should be documented.
And there are users. But if there is some minimal number of users
below which Debian must not support a package, I would like to point
out the historical and academic value of this package, which embodies
John Vlissides' Unidraw framework and the InterViews toolkit from
Stanford University. These have inspired the design of a good number
of intellectually derivative works such as Qt, Java Swing, and the
Eclipse GEF framework. And having that simple and easy-to-use binary
copy of idraw available on a Unix distribution is somewhat akin to
keeping ed or vi available as well.
If there is anything I can do to help with the re-instatement of
ivtools in the Debian distribution please let me know. I would point
out that the latest release (ivtools-1.2.8) upgraded the source to be
compatible with Ubuntu 9.10 and gcc-4.4.
Scott Johnston
http://www.ivtools.org
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