Bug#773869: freehep-graphicsio update

[merkys at debian.org]

Hello,

On 2019-11-23 12:30, Giovanni Mascellani wrote:
> I am not against this, but I think I would happily give away maintenance
> of these packages. I never used them directly, just needed them as
> GeoGebra dependencies.
>
> That said, before updating I would suggest to consider exactly what does
> one expects from these packages: do we consider them useful in Debian in
> themselves, or do we value them just as reverse dependencies (of
> GeoGebra and figtree)? Personally, I don't think they have much value by
> themselves; they are unmaintained upstream anyway and I doubt they are
> the best Java library for exporting images. Also, the average Java
> programmer is more probably going to use them from Maven, Gradle or
> whatever dependencies management tool happens to be à la page that month.

I totally agree with you. I've stumbled upon a package depending on
freehep-graphicsio, thus I'm inquiring about its status.

> As of using them as dependencies, I think upgrading needs some care:
> vectorgraphics has been developed in a very discontinuous way lately,
> and I believe it could have introduced a lot of API breakages. I think
> that at least one package already has GeoGebra-specific patches, because
> unfortunately that's how things happen in the Java ecosystem. So I would
> suggest whoever wants to upgrade the packages to check carefully that
> upgrading is not introducing bugs in GeoGebra and figtree.
>
> These are the reasons why, in the end, I never decided to upgrade. YMMV,
> and in this case no problem upgrading the packages, especially if you
> can also take maintenance. But please check carefully you are not
> breaking rev deps.

This sounds tedious. We may end up patching geogebra, figtree and
sweethome3d to accommodate the API changes. I'll talk to the upstream
about the possibility to use different software to generate images.

Thanks,
Andrius