Re: Switching to Artifex Ghostscript

[Marius Bakke]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:

> The subject of the two Ghostscripts came up last October, but we didn't
> really discuss it:
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-10/msg00598.html
>
> The canonical Ghostscript is developed by Artifex Software Inc:
>
> https://ghostscript.com/
>
> We package GNU Ghostscript, which is a fork of Artifex's Ghostscript:
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/ghostscript/
>
> Both programs are distributed under the AGPL, as far as I can tell. But
> Artifex Ghostscript is actively developed, which I think is very
> important for C software that is designed to handle untrusted input.

Thanks for bringing this up. GNU Ghostscript seemed to go
mostly-inactive[0] after Artifex changed to AGPL in 2013[1]. The latest
"upstream" release is 9.21[2], we have 9.14.0 (from 2014!).

I'm in favor of switching to the active fork.

[0] https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ghostscript/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript#History
[2] https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases

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