In article <2025Aug29.180908@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,   
   Anton Ertl  wrote:   
   >Buzz McCool  writes:   
   >>I did notice gforth is included with Debian 12 (bookworm), but not Debian 13   
   (trixie):   
   >>https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/all/allpackages   
   >>https://packages.debian.org/trixie/all/allpackages   
   >   
   >What I read is that the package maintainer Peter Pentchev no longer   
   >has time for maintaining the package, and nobody has picked it up.   
      
   Pentchev has the rank of Debian Developer.   
   It is hard to become a Debian developer, and they generally know   
   nothing about Forth and are not interested.   
   The term is orphaned. Everybody could volunteer to adopt the   
   package.   
   If you volunteer to be a maintainer for gforth, then at least you have   
   to get a sponsor who is a Debian Developer.   
      
   (I spent several years to get ciforth in the Debian distribution.   
   Got an official pgp identity to become a maintainer.   
   Got an officially deb distribution made that passed all tests.   
   My sponsor was not at all interested in Forth, and I decided   
   that was not a good situation. Never found a new sponsor for   
   the uploaded deb archive, it was removed after a certain period.   
   gforth should be easier because it is c-based and has part of Debian   
   for ages.)   
      
   Note that Pentchev should be following gforth, and has the task   
   to get more modern versions than 0.7.3 in Debian, in cooperation   
   with the gforth developers.   
      
   >Looking at other Forth systems in Debian, the yforth package is also   
   >in Debian 12, but not in Debian 13.  The maintainer is Bdale Garbee.   
   >   
   >The pforth package, also maintained by Bdale Garbee, is included in   
   >Debian 13.   
      
   In my experience Bdale is a bit, say, unresponsive.   
   He did sign up for forth's along time ago and   
   he is given up now. Look at man pforth, Garbee has cobbled a   
   manpage together with the information from ``pforth -h''.   
   yforth is even more bland, and bdale uses the term "cobble".   
   That is the kind of involvement to expect.   
      
   [yforth crashes on my system, if I were Debian, I removed it a long   
   time ago.]   
      
   >- anton   
      
   Groetjes Albert   
   --   
   The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA.   
   The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy   
   over 80 years, like Western Europe.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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