Hi, I'm officially orphaning arc.
Arc is an old archiver/unarchiver. For a long time its licensing status was unclear, and no one dared touch it. It has been GPLed lately but the sourceforge project seems dead (last release in 2003, "dump last version on the world and go away"). As a result the codebase suffers massive bitrot. A few security alerts were issued after a Debian review lately, but I fear a more thorough security audit would find more. Certainly all the build warnings are not encouraging. Moreover the problem of adaptation to newer gcc releases remains open. Also arc is not really needed nowadays - during its troubled licensing period an arc clone (nomarch) was written. It can only be used to uncompress arc archives but who needs to create arc files in 2005 ? The nomarch codebase is newer and seems a lot saner than the arc one. It certainly has not needed continuous patching like arc to adapt to rawhide gcc changes. arc was introduced with nomarch in fedora.us as an amavisd-new dep. However amavis does not need both (the amavis doc was somewhat unclear on this point), it will fall back on nomarch if arc is not found. New amavisd-new packages only require nomarch. They should probably even conflict with arc, since you really do not want to expose arc-quality code to the outside. I've just pushed a new arc version today with all known fixes. Since I don't use arc anymore, and I fear it will continue to require a lot of maintenance (more than I'm willing to do) I'm orphaning it now. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot
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