Volunteer to upgrade GhostScript

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 10:40 AM, René J.V. wrote:
> 2 questions:
>
> - are there still 2 ghostscript versions, and if so, are both affected (and/or interchangeable)?

What two versions? With a different licence you mean?

> - I got the impression Mojca feels the ABI-breaking update to eps2write was premature.

No, that wasn't *my* feeling. I cited a reply from a developer who had
to rewrite part of his software to make it compatible with the latest
GhostScript (and break compatibility with the old one).

> It's been too long since I last rolled my own ghostscript install so I can't remember if that component has a more generic function than converting EPS into MS Write format (which doesn't seem like it would be used a lot). Supposing it does serve a wider audience: isn't it possible to patch in the previous eps2write code for "a while"? Supposing of course that it is not eps2write for which applications could require ghostscript > 9.15 ...

I'm not aware of any MS-related functionality, but I'm not exactly
sure what you wanted to say. (Given that nobody even bothered to
update gs for a very long time, I'm not sure that we have the
man-hours available to code in the backward compatibility when the
upstream already dropped it.)

The problem is that "eps2write" only became available in 2014 (with gs
9.14) while "epswrite" was already deprectade in 9.12 (when eps2write
didn't even exist) and got removed in 9.15 (most likely).

So any software that relies on the presence of epswrite had to be
fixed (and because it would take a lot of effort to keep it compatible
with the older ghostscript, it will now be incompatible with older
versions of gs).

Mojca