Re: [Pan-users] Pan 0.99999999999999

[Duncan]

Ron Johnson posted on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:59:41 -0500 as excerpted:

> On 06/17/2011 09:06 AM, Duncan wrote:
> [snip]
>> FWIW, it shouldn't require them for that.  It'd either be a hard
>> dependency, pulled in when pan is installed, or not required, as pan's
>> decoding is built-in.  (I haven't looked in awhile, but IIRC it
>> includes its own slightly modified copy of IDR which decode library in
>> the sources, statically linked.  That's a bit of a no-no as apps are
>> supposed to use the system lib for ease of maintenance and security
>> update purposes, but the pan-bundled copy is modified for pan's own
>> use, so it had to be included.
> 
> Can you explain that?  "Shouldn't" pan be modified be modified to use
> the relevant shared libs?

I'd say yes, but I'm not a pan dev, neither do I actually code, so...  

Meanwhile, the directory is still there so I assume so is the lib, and 
it's uulib.

My guess is that way back in history (before I got involved with pan 
enough to be building it from source and understand this sort of stuff), 
possibly a decade ago or more, uulib may not have included yEnc, and 
because yEnc was not an official standards-track specification for quite 
some time, it's likely that upstream uulib said no to patches adding yEnc 
support.

Charles, or possibly the pan dev before him, would have been interested 
in yEnc for pan and so added yEnc support to the lib on his own, but then 
had to bundle it as upstream wouldn't take the patch.

Then over time the bundled version likely diverged from the upstream 
version and it became difficult to switch back to uulib or some other 
external alternative, by the time they included yenc.

At the time of the pan rewrite, presumably Charles was already familiar 
with his version and its bugs or lack thereof, so didn't switch back 
then, either.

That's as I suppose it to have happened anyway.  To be sure, I've no idea 
how close that might be, or not, to reality as it actually occurred.

That has always bothered me since I figured it out, but I've never really 
seen any distro pan maintainers (or anyone else, really) complaining 
about it.  Maybe I've got it all wrong somewhere.  Or maybe it really is 
so modified from whatever original, that it's no longer worth trying to 
separate out.  I don't know, but it still bothers me.  But pan is 
generally well behaved in terms of OTHER libraries, yet another reason 
I've always found it odd that this one was included...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman