Proposal to deprecate KFloppy

[Heiko Becker]

On Friday, 28 April 2023 15:16:29 CEST, Nate Graham wrote:
> Does it work for *anyone* with a modern distro? If not, then I 
> think archiving it makes sense. Time marches on. :)
>
> If it does work for *someone* with a modern distro then at the 
> very least the UI needs to detect when it will be broken and 
> tell this to the user in advance to prevent frustration.

I think it depends on the floppy kernel module, which should provide the 
device nodes Jonathan seems to be missing. AFAIK this kernel module isn't 
needed for "modern" floppy drives connected via USB though, but only for 
the ancient internal ones. That being said, the kernel module is orphaned.

My personal opionion is that that's enough to stop releasing it (after 
23.04.3). I also removed it from my distro downstream in 2015 and nobody 
ever even mentioned it.

Regards,
Heiko

> On 4/28/23 06:49, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
>> KFloppy is an old tool to format your floppy diskettes.  We 
>> packaged KFloppy for the Snap store but it doesn't work, 
>> neither does it work for the apt packages.  The code depends on 
>> features of Linux that do not seem to exist any more, expecting 
>> /dev/fd0 and other nodes in /dev.  It also depends on having 
>> tools like fdformat around which are not packages for Ubuntu 
>> any more.  I tested it with an external USB floppy drive.  The 
>> most recent maintainer seems to be Wolfgang Bauer.  Can we 
>> agree to archive it and stop releases?