[M3devel] libXaw.so.7

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 07:20:08AM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> 
> Apparently free/open Unices (Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD) have no binary compatibility.
> I find this very surprising, crazy, disappointing, but apparently true.
> We must distribute source to achieve the usual expected portability.
>  C source at that, to achieve the usual expected buildability.
> Or maybe I'm confused.
> The various commerical systems (Solaris, AIX, Irix, VMS, Windows, Darwin, HP-UX) do/did not have this problem.

Here's what aptitude has to say about libXaw7:

libXaW7 provides the second versin of XaW, the Athena Widgets toolkit, which is
largely used by legacy X applications.  This version is the most common
version, ass version 6 is considered deprecated, and vesion 8, which adds
Xprint support, is unsupported and not widely used. In geneeral use of a more
modern toolkit such as GTK+ is recommended

Now I'm not going to suggest that we abolish all use of libXaw in favour of 
GTK+.  But whatever other systems it runs on, the deb package for Modula 
3 does not work on any current version of Debian (neither  stable, 
testing, nor sid).  A new .deb needs to be made, if ti is to work 
properly on debian (surely the canonical userr of .deb packages)

I might add that if modula3 were still part of Debian, it should have 
had a dependdency on libXaw6, and that might have sufficed either to 
keep libXaw6 alive as a legacy package in additino to libXaw7, or to 
alert the maintainer that the Modula3 package needed to be updated 
somewhere early in the Debian deployment process -- certainly long 
before the advend of squeeze. 

But getting modula 3 back into Debian is another project, and possibly a 
big one.  Even the current modula 3 debs, though adequate for my 
purposes if updatad, are not nearly adequate for distribution via Debian 
because of matters like the file system standard and the like.

Now I'm guessing the code that is run to create the .deb files is still
around somewhere.  Are there clear instructions how to go about 
finding it and using it to make a debian source package and debian 
binary packages?

-- hendrik