Re: PoDoFo 1.1 released and relicensed to LGPL2+ or MPL 2.0

Hi,

would you consider packaging the new version yourself and requesting a
sponsor to upload it?

Best

Il giorno sab 9 mag 2026 alle ore 12:18 Francesco Pretto
<[email protected]> ha scritto:
>
> Hello debian-devel,
>
> This is my first post in this mailing list. I'm the maintainer of the
> upstream PoDoFo library[1], and I'm here to discuss the situation of
> the podofo library in Debian. The libpodofo package[2]  in Debian hasn't
> seen a major update since May 2022. Since then, three major upstream
> updates have been released: 0.10 in 2023, 1.0 in 2025 and 1.1 in 2026.
> 0.10.x and 1.0.x received updates until May 1st 2026 and are now
> deprecated, with 1.1.x selected as the new LTS series.
>
> We were in contact with the Debian/Ubuntu maintainer for a period and
> I hoped a newer release of PoDoFo in Debian was just a matter of time.
> Unfortunately, this hasn't happened. Because of the enduring
> situation, I want to make a clear statement about the status about the
> version of the PoDoFo distributed now in Debian:
>
> -  The 0.9.x series has not received an update since 0.9.8 and has
> been effectively deprecated. No previous upstream maintainer stepped
> in to support it so it's also unmaintained;
> - The PoDoFo tools have been indefinitely declared[3] unsupported and
> unmaintained.
>
> I leave the decision on how to proceed to the Debian developers. If a
> new Debian maintainer steps in to create 1.1 packages, I'd like to add
> a couple of notes to help with the integration:
>
> - As stated the new license is  LGPL2+ or MPL 2.0 for the source code.
> However, with the default enabled "Adobe Font Development Kit for
> OpenType" integration (Apache2 licensed) the library is not compatible
> with GPL2-only software as a whole. The integration allows for Type1
> font subsetting so I generally don't recommend disabling it;
> - I'm establishing a "no package patches" policy in PoDoFo, meaning
> that all reasonable features needed by packagers should be available
> by default in PoDoFo upstream. If you need a feature/fix, just ask for it;
> - The deprecated PoDoFo tools still compile, but are opt-in enabled.
> At some point they may be reinstated, but not in the short term.
>
> Feel free to ask if you need any further information.
>
> Best,
> Francesco
>
> [1] https://github.com/podofo/podofo
> [2] https://packages.debian.org/source/stable/libpodofo
> [3] https://github.com/podofo/podofo#podofo-tools
>


-- 
Salvo Tomaselli

I difensori della morale tradizionale sono raramente persone di cuore. Si è
tentati di pensare che essi si servano della morale come di legittimo sfogo
al loro desiderio di fare del male agli altri.
               -- Bertrand Russell, Perché non sono cristiano. 1957

http://ltworf.github.io/