Re: gnu-smalltalk was dropped from debian

[address@hidden]

GNU smalltalk could be useful in a purely command-line oriented way, for 
example with the EMACS (Emacs editor) integration which was as far as I 
understand it, the concept back in 1990 or so, back in the days of Steve Byrne.

Also the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Smalltalk claims that 
the initial release was in 2003, but I suspect it was rather around 1988 or so, 
back in the days of Steve Byrne and the fact that some source files seem to 
have a message:

Copyright 1988,92,94,95,99,2000,2001

GNU Smalltalk is presumably much older than 2003 as the wikipedia page 
incorrectly claims.

It may be possible to build a package on Debian without any user interface or 
GTK at all and thus address the concerns:

 1. No Debian maintainer - if Bill volunteers then this is solved
 2. Depends on GTK - try to solve this by packaging a purely Emacs CLI oriented 
GNU smalltalk
 3. Inactive upstream - remains potentially a problem

However if a Debian package is made for the CLI portion of GNU smalltalk 
without GTK, then this could possibly help to overcome issue 3.

Regards,
David Stes

----- Op 28 okt 2023 om 11:24 schreef Holger Freyther holger@freyther.de:

> Thanks for the heads up. Do we have any volunteers to re-activate the
> development of GNU Smalltalk, move towards GTK4?
> 
>> On 27. Sep 2023, at 13:21, bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:
>> 
>> reasons given for removal:
>> * no debian maintainer
>> * depends on GTK2
>> * inactive upstream
>> 
>> For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1049451
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 14:18:51 +0800 Holger wrote:
>>> Indeed. We should promote 3.2.91 to 3.3.0 and cope with VisualGST being 
>>> slightly
>>> broken (it's based on GTK+ 2.0 anyway). Let me aim to do this before the 
>>> end of
>>> the year.
>>> 
>>> holger
>>> 
>>> On 14. Nov 2021, at 09:11, bill-auger wrote:
>>>> the team should consider
>>>> promoting 3.2.91 to a release, before GNU smalltalk gets removed
>>>> from debian, for example - arch has been packaging 3.2.91 for years
>> 
>> 
>> i could perhaps maintain the debian package
>> 
>> WDYT?