It has come to my attention (since I am CC-d on that particular bug) that Gentoo treeclean team is about to remove hspell from main Gentoo portage tree. I've responded immediately to team lead, Alec Warner, about it, and we're discussing it in private mail ever since. He suggests that we have a local overlay of hspell and packages that need hspell support, or use http://gentoo-sunrise.org My response was on the inconvenience of such "solution", due to the fact that hspell support is already present in KDE and commented-out in Gentoo version of it for political/bureaucratic reasons. Other than maintaining our own overlay, the easiest and most straightforward way would be to add a recent version of hspell and revert the hspell-remove patch. Of course, there comes the real problem: no Gentoo developer is willing to watch the package and update the portage tree CVS if needed.
I am against mass-mailing Alec Warner as of that moment, please read on: A little bit of background: Hspell was originally imported at version 0.4 in April 2003 and maintained by Tal Peer and Alex Weber. They are since then retired as Gentoo developers and currently there is noone to act as a maintainer (which in that particular case is basically a liason between upstream developers and the CVS interface ;). In January 2005, Alon Bar-Lev submitted a new ebuild for the version 0.9 which, with minor fixes by yours truly, was never merged. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77751 12 months later, in December 2005, Gentoo KDE team removed hspell support from KDE due to incompatibility with the version in portage tree (0.7), the version requred was 0.8, while the version available on official site was 0.9. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114161 Currently, without packages that depend on hspell, the treeclean team has picked on the orphaned package and marked it pending removal on September 26. I know that there is a lab of Gentoo in Haifa University (using their own overlay when it comes to hspell and KDE). Honestly, I'm a bit tired of Gentoo way of breaking^Wrunning things, and Debian seems more and more appealing every day. Let's establish how many Gentoo users are there that hspell is important to them. -- Sincerely Yours, Michael Vasiliev Linux-IL moderator "I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me." -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
