CHMLib is a library to handle CHM files.
It is used by Okular and other applications to show those files.
It hasn't had a release in 11 years.
It is packaged by all major distributions.
A few weeks ago I got annoyed because we need to carry a patch in Okular flathub because the code is not great and it defines it's own int types.
I tried contacting the upstream author, but unsurprisingly after 11 years he doesn't seem to care much and got no answer.
Then i looked saw that various distributions carry different random set of patches, not great.
So I said, OK, maybe we should just fork it, and emailed 14 people listed at repology as package maintainers for CHMLib saying how they would react to KDE forking CHMLib in an effort to do some basic maintenance, i.e. get it to compile without need for patches, make sure all the patches different distributions has are in the same place, etc.
1 packager answered saying "great"
1 packager answered "nah we want to follow upstream" (... which part of upstream is dead did they not understand?)
1 person answered saying "i haven't been packaging for $DISTRO for ages" (makes sense given how old the package is)
1 person answered saying "not a maintainer anymore but i think you should not break API/ABI of CHMLib" (which makes sense, never said that was planned)
And that's it, so only 4 out of 14 answers and only one of them encouraging.
So I'm asking *YOU*, should we push for a fork or I should stop this crazyness and do something more productive?
