Re: Overall Unmet dependencies
On Wed, Jan 06, 1999 at 11:46:22PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> Avery Pennarun wrote:
> > I don't think there was ever a newer version of Xcompat -- at least, I'm up
> > to a semi-recent slink, and I still have this on my system:
> >
> > ii xcompat 3.1.2-4 X11R5 and X11R6 a.out compatibility librarie
> >
> > I need it to use a rather old version of Waterloo Maple. Seems to work
> > fine, I see no reason to take it out.
>
> Do we have source for it, and can we still build it?
Source is available, it's xfree86. Building it is only possible if you have
libc4 devel tools, which virtually no one does anymore.
Taking it out would be bad, though, because there are still a few persistant
libc4 apps that people would like to run.
I have nothing against moving it down to contrib, since quality control will
obviously suffer. It probably has security holes, but if you still have a
setuid libc4-based xterm, xcompat is the least of your problems.
Moving to non-free seems like overkill; xcompat for libc4 is as free as the
rest of XFree86.
I'm sure we could find the exact source code for it too, but it would just
be pointless (no one will want to or have the tools to rebuild it unless
they really try, in which case they can get the old XFree86 sources too).
Incidentally, the XF86 license doesn't require us to redistribute source,
and I don't think it's non-free just because we're too lazy to track it down
:)
Have fun,
Avery
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