Expect mainenance and downstream patches

[Andrej Shadura]

Hi all,

A friend brought my attention to the situation with Expect: the upstream maintenance slowed down to the point when the maintainer said he hasn’t got time to work on it anymore [1]; the SF project hasn’t been updated to point to the Fossil repo, and the repo itself hasn’t been updated to clarify where the project lives [2]. Meanwhile, downstreams have been shipping patches for Expect, some of which could probably be folded into the upstream releases to make the job of distro maintainers easier (e.g. OpenEmbedded and Debian had to reimplement the cross-building patches independently because it was not supported at the time).

Having used Expect in the past myself, it never occurred to me it wasn’t officially a core package. I think team maintenance would be ideal for such an important package, as it makes it less likely this situation happens again when the maintainer burns out or changes jobs or has other reasons to spend less time on the project.

What do you think?

P.S. I don’t use Usenet particularly often (or, rather, at all), so I don’t know if it’s possible to Cc people in this post, but Google Groups doesn’t offer this, otherwise I’d try and add Nils and others.

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/p/expect/bugs/107/
[2]: https://core.tcl-lang.org/expect/
[3]: https://sources.debian.org/src/expect/5.45.4-2/debian/patches/
[4]: http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/lang/tcl-expect/
[5]: https://github.com/openembedded/openembedded-core/tree/HEAD/meta/recipes-devtools/expect/expect

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Cheers,
Andrej