[arch-general] Status of swt and azureus/vuze

[Ondřej Kučera]

Hello all,

this has been brought on a couple of times before but never resolved. 
The situation is to my knowledge as follows:

(1) There is an azureus package in [extra]. It is very much outdated (I 
think it hasn't been really updated for about at least a year) and it 
has been orphaned for most of the time. (I'm not sure if it even works 
anymore but perhaps it does.) The only nice thing about is package is 
that it is built from Azureus sources instead of using the precompiled 
Azureus binaries provided by upstream (although it is maybe questionable 
whether or not this is an advantage or how big).

(2) There is a swt package in [extra], version 3.3.2. It has been 
flagged out of date (I may have done that myself, I'm not sure) for some 
time now, version 3.4 has been released in June, almost half a year ago. 
This package, too, is built from sources instead of provided binaries. 
The only package depending on swt is the above mentioned azureus.

(3) There is a vuze package in unsupported (vuze is the new name of 
azureus for those who aren't familiar). It is up-to-date, only it is not 
built from sources. It just more or less takes the provided binaries and 
uncompress them into /opt/vuze. This package has its own version of SWT 
bundled in, I've tried at least to save some disk space by removing 
bundled swt.jar and using the one from [extra], unfortunately vuze then 
wouldn't start. I'm not sure where the error lies, I suspect it has 
something to do with the way swt in [extra] is built but I may be wrong 
(I can provide more details, the error message for example, if anyone's 
interested).

My personal conclusion: not that many users really use vuze, because I 
seem to be the only one complaining here all the time (I think this is 
at least the third time I'm opening this). :-) (On the other hand vuze 
in unsupported has almost 50 votes, so probably users use this version 
instead of the outdated version in [extra].) Also, devs probably don't 
want to maintain vuze or swt, I'm not blaming them at all (there has 
been an e-mail describing how tricky it is to compile it from sources), 
and when there's no one to use it, what's the point anyway?

I think one of two things should happen.
(a) Someone (ideally just one person) - a dev I mean - will adopt 
azureus again, rename it to vuze and update it to the latest version, 
alongside with swt. Then the vuze package in unsupported can be deleted.
(b) Both azureus and swt will be dropped from extra. Then the vuze in 
unsupported will become more or less "official" (or at least the only 
available version in ArchLinux world) and perhaps a TU can then move it 
to [community] if they feel like maintaining it. It might also be 
possible to create a swt package in unsupported and let vuze depend on 
it (because perhaps there are more applications out there that could 
depend on swt) - if one sticks to the precompiled binaries, it's not 
that hard to maintain it.

Any ideas or solutions? Should I for example file a bug report instead?

Ondřej


-- 
Cheers,
Ondřej Kučera