Who Maintains the GNU Plotutils?

The GNU plotutils package contains a reimplementation of a pic language processor. I find pic invaluable for drawing diagrams; in fact the sequence diagram editor in my UMLGraph system, depends on it. The current version is 2.4.1, and was released in July 2000 - almost four years ago. I have discovered two bugs, but no one seems to be maintaining the package. This is unfortunate.

I do not have time to be the package's maintainer; I have already adopted another open source orphan: bib2xhtml, and I am also busy working on open source code projects of my own.

All I can do is document a workaround. By passing the pic2plot generated Postscript output through the following sed filter, the two problems get fixed.

#!/usr/bin/sed -f
#
# Fix pic2plot output
#
# Diomidis Spinellis, December 2004
#

# Correct the BeginResource DSC syntax
s/^%%BeginResource /%%BeginResource: /

# FontBBox is not always an executable array
s/\[FontBBox\]/\/FontBBox load/

Another thought would be to set up an orphan open source project adoption agency. I am sure many professionals and students would like to adopt a project, as a form of paying back from the benefits they receive from open source software. We could also establish as a goal for every open source developer to adopt at least one orphan open source code project.

Comments   Toot! Tweet Share