The road to dropping xdvik

[Jonathan Underwood]

Dear All,

We currently ship xdvik as a package separate to texlive (for a
variety of reasons). Looking forward to when we ship texlive-2009,
it'll be built as part of the texlive package build once more.
However, even better would be to drop it entirely, for the following
reasons:

1) It's a legacy piece of software which is barely maintained - a
couple of times a year releases are made with small bugfixes, but
there's no actual development

2) We patch it heavily to bodge in japanese support using a separate
upstream patch from http://sourceforge.jp/projects/xdvi/, but this
patch isn't actively maintained either, and rebasing that patch is a
time sink.

3) The need to incoorporate the japanese patch, and also the desire to
build against the system installed kpathsea shared lib rather than
link statically means we end up hacing the autotools scripts and have
to run autotools during package building, and worse, we have to use
old autotools as the scripts are so crusty.

4) It's one of the few users of the Xaw(3d) toolkit in the repo, and
also requires legacy font support (IIRC).

However, it's not clear to me if okular and evince-dvi provide
equivalent functionality that we're yet in a position to drop xdvik.
Comments? If you use xdvik because other viewers don't give some
particular functionality, it would be helpful if you stated what that
functionality is.

Cheers,
Jonathan