Hi,

I do not know the history of xloadimage and xli.  The latter looks to
be a (relatively) better maintained fork of the former.  So I use
the latter instead of the former (though that's probably due to
ignorance more than anything else!).  This bug is a request to

 * find the technical differences between the two viewers;

 * try to port the good features from the lesser to the better one;

 * if there are deep incompatibilities, see if it's possible to make
   it configurable or something like findutils's /usr/bin/fold vs
   /usr/bin/oldfind split to still let people work with one codebase

 * make one Debian package into a dummy package that pulls in the
   other.

Naturally that's a lot to do; even partial progress would be very
helpful in making useful package descriptions to help people choose
between the two packages possible.

By the way, the only upstream location I could find for the two is

 ftp://ftp.x.org/R5contrib/xloadimage.4.1.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xli.1.16.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xli.README

Is there someplace else that people coordinate on patches?  (E.g.,
where does xli 1.17.0+20061110 come from?)

Thanks for your work, and sorry to fill your inbox with this nonsense
(though I hope it can be useful nonsense).

Hi Jonathan,

thanks for contributing your views on xloadimage and xli!

Neither do I. I am maintaining xloadimage inside Debian because it is a
package quite some people use (and has a history of security issues, so
someone should care about it).

I do know that xloadimage has long been dropped upstream. It could be
said that Debian, with the large set of patches it carries, might be the
de facto maintainer of xloadimage as a whole.

After a quick look, the same might be true for xli ;).

Ryan, maybe you can provide something more?

…and these have gone, too. The watch fiel of the xloadimage package I
uploaded today uses the GWDG mirror ☹.

Yep, it is useful.

So, I'd like to hear what Ryan, the maintainer of xli, has to say to this ☺.

Cheers,
Nik

Dominik George dixit:

With my hats “MirBSD maintainer” and “heavy xloadimage user”
(but not with my Debian hats on), yes on both counts:

• quite some people use it

• Debian is the de-facto maintainer (BSD ports use Debian’s package,
  both origtgz and patches, as upstream)

I’d love to keep xloadimage.

Thanks,
//mirabilos

Opened a separate ticket about "homepage" field missing

     <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1107233>

Also relevant a very old ticket about upstream authors email contact

     <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=219315>