(From an email to Ashif)

cleaning up plg2's xh-maintenance output Unless otherwise marked, packages are only on sun560.

So, there are about 25 xhier packages installed on plg2 that are causing xhier's maintenance to barf (and it probably has been for some time, since plg2 became a v880 running Solaris 8 instead of an e450 running Solaris 6). Most of these are only present on sun560 and nowhere else - ie, they were only ever built for Solaris 6. Their binaries are (mostly) still present, and may even still work, so I don't want to just remove them all. However, fixing this may require putting the sources on a Solaris 8 machine (either sun580 or cscf.cs), building them there, and then putting the results on plg2.

We can avoid this if you can tell me if we even still need these packages. Some of this code is only on 32 bit operating systems, making me wonder if maybe it's not 64 bit clean? I know little of these matters.

ciao-1

Solaris 6. Binaries include things like ciao_*, ksh93, lefty, x_ciao. Adrian's the listed maintainer. Synopsis: Tools from ATT for analysing C, C++ and HTML Recommendation: delete if unneeded, otherwise build for Solaris 8.

deliver

Solaris 6. Binaries include deliver, deliver-antispam, and header. Unmaintained package. Synopsis: Local control of mail delivery Recommendation: I'd bet this can be replaced by procmail. Remove it.

emacs-contrib

aix 4.3, Solaris 6, Solaris8. No binaries, it looks like it's a bunch of programs for emacs (maybe they make it back into a text editor?). Synopsis: Emacs lisp code that is not part of the standard distribution. Recommendation: replace with the packages from sun580.

finduser

Solaris 6/7. Binary is finduser, which gives a bus error when run. Unmaintained. Synopsis: is non-comment-free, but it says something about it used to be called whois. Recommendation: remove it.

fontinst

Solaris 6. No binaries, just data, looks like a lot of .mtx, .tex, and .etx files. Unmaintained. Synopsis: The fontinst package for generating font metrics, etc. Also includes the fonts required for mathptm which provides support for typesetting Math mode in TeX using PostScript fonts. Recommendation: no idea. sun560 thinks only spinneret.cgl gets that package from it, so I doubt anybody is using these things anywhere else. I'd say remove it.

idraw

Solaris 6. Binaries are idraw and _idraw; the former is a shell script that basically just calls the latter with a couple of different options. Unmaintained. Looks like Jeff Voskamp used to maintain it though (I googled on "idraw trojan horse" because the synopsis file claimed that it "could be".) Synopsis: um. Very confusing. Look at /software/idraw/.admin/Synopsis. Recommendation: remove it.

irc-client-2.6

Solaris 6. Binary is irc-2.6. I'll go out on a limb and guess it's an IRC client, a very old one. Unmaintained. Recommendation: remove it. Even if somebody wants to IRC from plg, there's far better clients available now, albeit not xhiered (ircii-4.4, BitchX).

javajfc-1.1

Solaris 6. Only bcr4 (a Broadband machine), goedel (our old webserver), and tiercel (an IST test machine) are listed as getting it from sun560. Patrick is listed as the maintainer, but I bet that's a holdover from when he was IST. There's nothing actually IN this package. Synopsis: Java Foundation Class (now called swing) Recommendation: unsure. Does anybody use this? I doubt it, there's no binaries and no libraries. So I'd say remove it.

lgrind-uw

Solaris 6, Solaris8. Binary is lgrind-uw. Unmaintained. Synopsis: A locally modified version of lgrind. Recommendation: Re-install from cscf.cs, plg2.math's normal upstream source. Binaries are there.

libstdc++-2.9

AIX 4.3, 32 bit IRIX 6.5, Solaris 6/7. Includes exactly one library, libstdc++.so.2.9.0. Maintainer is Jeff Voskamp. Synopsis: the shared libraries from egcs-1.1 (since there isn't a gcc-2.9). Recommendation: Remove it. If anybody still needs it, we ought to build it on sun580. gcc 2.95 includes libstdc++ 2.10, it looks like.

libtools

Solaris 6. Includes hytelnet and liblook binaries. This isn't the libtools you're thinking of, it's tools for print libraries. Unmaintained. Descendants are goedel, mfcf.math, and pythagoras. Synopsis: * Tools for dealing with data provided by the UW library, particularly the periodicals lists in the uw.library.journals newsgroups. Also includes the kind of neat hytelnet command. Recommendation: remove it or port it to Solaris 8, shouldn't take much doing. Then we could put it in the general research environment too, since it was on pythagoras. (Maybe we could see if Core would be willing to do this.)

matlab-5.2

AIX 4.3, 32 bit IRIX 6.5, Solaris 6/7. Recommendation: we've much newer versions of MatLab. I've no idea how they all work though. This is the only version installed on plg2.math though. I'd say remove or replace it with a newer version.

mk

Solaris 6. No binaries, but it has manpages for membername and mk and mkconv. Other machines that have it are goedel, mfcf.math, pythagoras, and watfor. Unmaintained. Synopsis: MK, a successor to Make (from the AT&T Toolchest). Recommendation: don't we get make from both vendor and GNU now? Do we need the ATT version still? Remove it if the answers are yes/yes and no. If the answer to the last is yes, make it work on Solaris 8 and send it down.

modula3-3.6

Solaris 6. Lots of binaries. I assume it's version 3.6. The ORIGIN file says it came from gatekeeper.dec.com, and is dated 14 May 2002 on capo (but so is the older 3.5.3 release). Recommendation: find out whatever the latest release of whatever flavour of Mod3 compiler this is and build it, if it's still required. Otherwise, ditch it. It's on goedel/mfcf/pythagoras, so somebody else may eventually port it to Solaris 8.

netdiag

Debian 3.0, 64 bit IRIX, Solaris 6. No binaries on plg2, but I bet it has on the other platforms - it's got a manpage for traceroute. Jeff Voskamp is the listed maintainer, and sun560 claims it's on lots of other machines. Synopsis: miscellaneous network commands that are missing on some architectures. Recommendation: "miscellaneous" is misleading; the only sources on capo are for traceroute as well. If traceroute is needed on plg2, build it for Solaris 8 and distribute that. Otherwise, ditch it. (Odd, traceroute is definitely present on Debian machines of any age and flavour, to say nothing of 3.0... oh well.)

postscript

Solaris 6. No binaries, but it includes what looks to be many fonts, presumably in postscript format (ls -lR /software/postscript/data/font). They're very old, they date from 14 April 1989. Fraser Gunn is listed as the maintainer. sun560 says these packages are many places, including pythagoras and goedel and watfor. Synopsis: miscellaneous useful postscript files, tools, and documentation. Recommendation: see if these things are still needed. If so, get Fraser to package for Solaris 8. Otherwise ditch it.

qi-2.3

AIX 4.3, 32 bit IRIX 6.5, Solaris 6/7. Binary is ph. Unmaintained. Synopsis: v2.3 of the ph/qi nameserver. Recommendation: port it to Solaris 8 if anybody still uses it on plg2. It's distributed to tons of places. Otherwise ditch it.

uw

Solaris 6. Binaries are uw, uwplot, uwterm, uwtitle, uwtool. Maintainer: Ray Butterworth. Synopsis: Multiple window access to UNIX for MAC's and Atari-ST's (freeware from net). Recommendation: Remove it. It's doubtful this does anything that vnc or ssh + X11 forwarding can't do on modern Macs.

vixiecron

32 bit IRIX 6.5, Solaris 6. bins are vcrontab. Paul Vixie's cron package. Also very old and likely chock fulla holes. Unmaintained. Synopsis: a replacement for crontab (but I bet not system). Recommendation: remove it. If it MUST be around, then update it.

x11r5_basics, x11r5_bitmaps, x11r5_dev, x11r5_minimal, xanswerbook

Solaris 6/7. Binaries are twm, xdm, xhost, xmodmap, xrefresh, xset, and so on. Synopsis: pretty obvious, I hope. Recommendation: replace with whatever x11 packages we've got that replaced these. I don't know if anything PLG counts on for their environment depends on these packages though, that isn't part of the newer versions.

xemacs-20.4

32/64 bit IRIX 6.5, Solaris 6/7. Recommendation: not sure. Seems to me you guys are pretty happy with this and weren't at all keen on upgrading to 21.x. But maybe that was plain ol' emacs? If you don't care about xemacs, then upgrade to 21.1, which is latest (and only) version on cscf.cs. If you do want 20.4 still, then we can probably build it for Solaris 8 easily enough.

xpm-3.4f

AIX 4.3, 32/64 bit IRIX 6.5, Solaris 6/7. Recommendation: xpm 3.4k is present on PLG and is the asserted version. So ditch this package, unless you want both around, in which case build it for Solaris 8 and use that.

-- MikePatterson - 19 Mar 2005