Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Hi,
I'm officially orphaning arc.
Sounds fine. I've always wondered why anybody still used it these days,
with its 11-character limit on filenames and such. I wrote the darn Unix
port and I stopped using it years ago.
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").
Well, the idea was to keep it current but obviously no one is going to
add new features to it. That would be pointless.
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,
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/
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