A mess called ghostscript !!!

[Pedro F. Giffuni]

Hi guys;

I went to look into one of my old ports... gnu
ghostscript, and I found that it's an incredible mess
that I don't recognize anymore!!

I had always hoped the afpl-ghostscript maintainer
adopted some of the port cleaning I did back then, but
evidently the opposite happened. The idea was to
maintain a port for the fonts and one for ghostscript
and use the fonts for X and other apps. Nowadays there
is a port for every ghostscript+font combination
possible! Also the build process used to respect the
order suggested by the distribution, but unfortunately
people have added lots of drivers and their patches in
a way that it's very difficult to understand what is
happening and very easy to break things.

If I were to fix such a mess (I won't ..sorry) I would
start with the old gnu-ghostscript port. If there is
anyone maintaining it occasionally (there must be!!),
please take into account the following:

- hpdj is for all effects dead and has been replaced
by the pcl3 driver, it makes no sense to include both!
I added hpdj..so I know :).

- there is a libsvga driver in the base distribution
that I didn't add back then because we didn't have
libsvga. It would be great to have it now, especially
for the non-X11 case.

-there is a new gnu-ghostscript release available, and
since this is the version distributed in the CDs it
should be better maintained.

Sorry about the whinning...but well... I just can't
help it sometimes.

    Pedro.


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