The current maintainer of netkit-telnet, Mats Erik Andersson
<mats.andersson@gisladisker.se>, is apparently not active anymore.
Therefore, this package has been orphaned

Maintaining a package requires time and skills. Please only adopt this
package if you will have enough time and attention to work on it.

If you want to be the new maintainer, please see
https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/#howto-o for detailed
instructions how to adopt a package properly.

Some information about this package:

Package: netkit-telnet
Binary: telnet, telnetd
Version: 0.17-42
Maintainer: Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 10~), libncurses-dev, cmake
Architecture: any
Standards-Version: 3.9.8
Format: 3.0 (quilt)
Files:
 5f3c09666f11b4e4ea5b0b4bd4c8e668 1792 netkit-telnet_0.17-42.dsc
 d6beabaaf53fe6e382c42ce3faa05a36 133749 netkit-telnet_0.17.orig.tar.gz
 eb4fbbdc55a3b53f7f2ebdc1f857b0cc 36068 netkit-telnet_0.17-42.debian.tar.xz
Checksums-Sha256:
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Package-List:
 telnet deb net standard arch=any
 telnetd deb net optional arch=any
Directory: pool/main/n/netkit-telnet
Priority: source
Section: net

Mattia Rizzolo <mattia@debian.org> writes:

Hi!  Upstream is not maintained either -- at least the download URL in
netkit-telnet's debian/copyright file does not work.  How about dropping
netkit-telnet from Debian?  GNU InetUtils provides telnet+telnetd and
appears to be actively maintained both in Debian and upstream, and could
provide the packages going forward.  If there is anything missing in
InetUtils compared to netkit-telnet(d), I'm happy to assist from the GNU
InetUtils upstream side.  Cc'ing Debian maintainer of inetutils too, do
you have any comments Guillem?

/Simon

Hi!

Considering how popular telent is, this is a migration that needs to be
taken with care.
I have no stake on netkit-telnet myself, and I honestly do not care as
long as a working `telent` is available.  But since this is the default
`telnet` it needs to be properly evaluated.

For sure any such takeover can only happen in a few months after
bullseye is released.

Overall, with netkit-telnet orphaned, I think the final opinion rests on
Guillem.  If he believes this is the way forward, I encourage him to
simply build a transitional package from src:inetutils.

Mattia Rizzolo <mattia@debian.org> writes:

Indeed -- a source code comparison would be great.  I believe InetUtils
sources share the same origin as NetKit, but diverged at some point.
Maybe it is sufficient to compare command line parameters and its
stdin/stdout behaviour (prompting etc).

That would give plenty of testing time before bullseye+1.

I'm happy to help upstream to make this smoother.

/Simon

* Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> [210415 19:06]:

In #982253 I've expressed that I for one would find that to be a
good idea. But quite clearly it is work that needs to be a) done and
b) well coordinated.

Good luck!
Chris

Chris Hofstaedtler <zeha@debian.org> writes:
bullseye is out, although Guillem have to agree since he maintains
inetutils in Debian.  If something needs to be modified in inetutils to
be more compatible with netkit, I will help to arrange that.  Starting
with telnet+telnetd seems like a good idea.  As far as I can tell,
telnet is not installed by default on buster nor bullseye which is good.

Btw, the suggestion to symlink telnet to netcat is not a good one:
telnet is a complex protocol, netcat doesn't support any of it as far as
I know.

/Simon

Hi!

That'd be great, thanks! I think I've mentioned before, but in any
case getting #945861 fixed would be nice, as I took a look but run
out of time trying to figure out what was the problem.

Adding TLS support to both inetutils telnet and telnetd would also be
great, even though inetutils versions support Kerberos, but I think
probably more people might use TLS enabled telnet than Kerberos
enabled telnet. This might make it possible to also get rid of
telnet-ssl and telnetd-ssl.

I've not checked if there are any differences in the options,
otherwise I'd be fine with adding a transitional package, to smooth
the upgrade, and then simply just provide telnet and telnetd (in
addition to telnet-client and telnet-server) virtual packages.

I agree.

Thanks,
Guillem

All,

I'm considering to adopt this package, as it has been orphaned for
around five years in Debian.  I wanted to reach out to some people
(cc'd) that appear to have been involved in the discussions around it to
make sure I'm not missing anything that should be considered.

My aim is to 1) refresh the packaging including hopefully some
autopkgtests, 2) figure out if there is a better upstream for this
package, and 3) prepare to smooth out any issues preventing migrating
towards inetutils in Debian.

I have create a Salsa project and imported unstable debian/ and fixed
some minor issues:

https://salsa.debian.org/jas/netkit-telnet
https://salsa.debian.org/jas/netkit-telnet/-/pipelines

What do you think?

/Simon

* Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> [210902 10:02]:

Sounds good to me.

If the plan is indeed to fade out src:netkit-telnet, then assuming
Maintainer:-ship for it is a very good start.

Chris

fre 2021-09-03 klockan 08:47 +0200 skrev Christoph Biedl:

Thanks for providing some background -- I was a bit surprised to see a
debian-specific cmake build system!  I think it doesn't make a lot of
sense to do any major changes (at least I'm not planning to) until
there is a reasonable upstream, so I have no plans to touch this part
of the package -- but if any future upstream release builds fine, I
would be inclined to drop as many of our patches as possible.

/Simon

Simon Josefsson wrote...

My contribution is completely a thing to the past, and should be
recorded in the related bug reports: This is an entire suite of packages
which - besides being faily old - all suffered from a missing build
system so I ported it to cmake for the buster release. That was a huge
amount of work and I'm not really proud of the result. Activities
included contacting upstream, and he eventually provided a copy of the
configuration tool but I stronly doubt it's worth to revive it.

Long story short, good ride with this package. In case you want some
more old stories or additional insight, just ping me. Odds are my
reaction will be "Oh, you're right, I missed that bit".

Kind regards,

    Christoph

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
netkit-telnet, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 986997@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> (supplier of updated netkit-telnet package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2022 11:20:23 +0200
Source: netkit-telnet
Architecture: source
Version: 0.17-45
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Changed-By: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Closes: 986997
Changes:
 netkit-telnet (0.17-45) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Claim ownership of package.  Closes: #986997.
   * Use Standards-Version 4.6.1.
   * Bump copyright year of debian/ files.
   * Fix syntax of lintian override.
   * Add Vcs-Browser and Vcs-Git.
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