2004.12.27
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.