Re: failing packages

[Andreas Enge]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 01:14:22PM +0200, Federico Beffa wrote:
> Yes, the software dates 1992 and works great. Electromagnetism has not
> changed since then.

Well, maybe the physics have not, but compilers and language standards have;
it is rare to see very old code compiling without problems today.
(Pure and proper C code usually does, but this is no contradiction to my
previous sentence.)

> Why would you want to drop it?

As long as there is interest in the package, and someone with interest
volunteers to fix it, then I do not want to drop anything!

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 05:20:07PM +0200, Federico Beffa wrote:
> The problem appears to be with TeXLive 2015 and its 'dvips' command
> being unable to handle some .ps files:
> https://www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2015-June/037013.html

This looks really nasty - so the bitrot problem does not concern the code,
but its documentation! It appears that there is some non-free tex file
that was only discovered as such recently and consequently taken out from
texlive.

Actually, such a non-free file is distrubuted with the fastcap source:
   doc/psfig sty
has the following license:
% Permission is granted for use and non-profit distribution of psfig/tex
% providing that this notice be clearly maintained, but the right to
% distribute any portion of psfig/tex for profit or as part of any commercial
% product is specifically reserved for the author.

The offending macro "startTexFig" is used there, and it was probably defined
in some other non-free file of the psfig universe that was removed from
texlive.

So clearly we need to remove psfig.sty from the tarball, and then all
inclusions of ps figures of the form
   ug-run.tex:\psfig{figure=\figuredir/cubes.eps}
from the .tex files. Potentially replacing "\psfig" by "\includegraphics"
is enough, more likely, some other parameters will have to be adapted as well.

There is one more dubious file in the doc directory: ieee.sty, which comes
without any license. There is a latex class ieetran on CTAN:
   http://www.ctan.org/pkg/ieeetran
and another one ieeeconf.

Do you have some (la-)tex experience and could have a look?
Unfortunately the software does not seem to be in debian, from where we
might have taken a patch.

Andreas