2024.02.12 21:42 "Re: [Tiff] libtiff 4.6.0 is released", by Lee Howard

OK, but it seems that "hylafax.org" is not maintained. Does ~everybody think that hylafax.org is no longer relevant to anything?

The Debian (and therefore Ubutnu) HylaFAX package maintainer is still using it, for whatever reason. Of course, it's been very little work for him to not have to do any updates. So, maybe that's why.

Is "HylaFAX+" a continuation fork viewed by the community as established, and therefore this sourceforge repo is the proper upstream for the package known as hylafax? Or is that hylafax the package is not maintained and packagers should add a hylafax+ package instead?

I guess it depends on who you ask. The old HylaFAX, even from 2005, was quite reliable and functional. So, even using the old HylaFAX would be fine for many uses.

Most of the people who I know use it in large applications are using HylaFAX+. But, to be fair, I don't think that I'm going to be involved much with the ones who are not using HylaFAX+, because that's probably the first thing that I'd encourage them to change.

As for the community's views, I'm biased, and so I can't answer that accurately... and as the community is much smaller today than it was 20 years ago, I think it would be difficult to know because the number of downloads/hits/uses and general activity is much reduced. Most of us who use is have been using it and don't need to generate mailing list traffic or such over it. So, it often seems like we're all just lurking.

I see that HylaFAX+ had a release in January 2023 -- but apparently not one that works with libtiff 4.6.0.

For practical purposes it's impossible to have any HylaFAX release work with libtiff v4.6.0. Unless one were to rewrite the demoted libtiff tools completely, it's just not practical. For HylaFAX use the only practical view is that libtiff v4.6.0 is broken. HylaFAX depends on libtiff and the libtiff tools... which tools libtiff has removed in v4.6.0.

The future solution to this dilemma appears to be far from accepted, unfortunately. At the moment anyone wanting to use HylaFAX or any other software that depends on the tools will need to use libtiff v4.5.1. In the future it may be possible to restore the tools to libtiff. If not, then there may need to be an alternative libtiff made available that has the tools still in it.

Thanks,

Lee.