Re: Switching to Artifex Ghostscript

[Ludovic Courtès]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Marius Bakke <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> Me too.  In fact, I once tried to package Artifex Ghostscript, but
> failed in the attempt to unbundle libraries.

Ditto.  In the discussion you mentioned above, Didier Link of
GNU Ghostscript did not really address our concerns.

Thanks,
Ludo’.