If you use Plucker and/or the Plucker desktop, please raise your hand…

Plucker seems to be silent on the development scene as of late. The last development thing they did was within the past 6 months and they added a patch which actually raises the version to 1.9. Those of you who use Plucker in Debian and/or Ubuntu may have noticed the desktop edition is a mess. As of right now, the version available for a merge into Gutsy from Debian Sid has the desktop building disabled. This can’t be good, but I really don’t know 100% because I am not an avid Plucker user. But seeing as I have helped maintain in the past, I wanted to see how much work is involved with getting it release ready.

The amount of work is crazy, but guess what….I got it to build the desktop, and while at it, I patched a couple of the issues that were reported in bug reports in Ubuntu. Now the building was insane, because for some reason the patch or the developers decided to use a library called libhttp which hasn’t been developed or worked on since 2001. I don’t know why they didn’t use something like libcurl, but that is them not me, plus the libhttp library is for embedded communications that involve streaming over a socket.

Good news none the less, I am working on getting the libhttp package into Debian right now, I am 75% there, I just have to make a couple of changes and it will/should get sponsored. Once that happens, then I can just sync it into Ubuntu and finish getting Plucker to function correctly. I have been in communications with the Debian maintainer for Plucker and he is interested as well, so hopefully sometime soon we should have a viable Plucker package. And when that is complete, I will hopefully get it backported to those of you using previous stable releases. That’s it for now, sorry for the double posting 🙂