Re: Rebasing x11/motif on actively maintained fork

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2026 at 19:48, Paolo Vincenzo Olivo <vins%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> Upstream Motif hasn't seen activity in nearly 3 years.
> https://sourceforge.net/p/motif/code/ci/master/tree/
>
> On one hand, I favor slow-paced development and I'm ok with periods
> of inactivity. In addition, the niche of Motif applications doesn't
> exactly overlap with that of cutting edge software.
>
> On the other hand, I bumped across this actively maintained fork,
> which published a major release just a month ago:
> https://github.com/thentenaar/motif/releases
>
> The rationale behind this fork is explained in the project's homepage:
>
> > This fork of Motif was born of a desire to keep Motif (and other X11
> > technologies) alive and well. The original upstream Sourceforge project
> > hasn't had any activity in over two years, none of the project admins
> > have been active for at least that amount of time, the official bug
> > tracker has disappeared into the void; and the user forum was closed way
> > back in 2017. Sadly, it appears that the original upstream has abandoned
> > the project.
>
> > I've incorporated some fixes from upstream that have laid dormant for
> > years, a few others from Gentoo, and made a few improvements of my own.
> > I intend to maintain this fork, and in doing so advocate for the
> > continued use of the user interface toolkit that defined an era, and
> > influenced many of the user interfaces that came after it
>
> v2.4.0 seems to bring many enhancements and bug fixes over 2.3.8 so it
> may be worth taking a look at it, testing it with some applications and
> evaluate the possibility of moving x11/motif to such fork. I haven't
> done this myself, and can't tell whether it would break any package
> depending on it, but I would give it a shot if there's any interest in
> it.

Sounds like it might be worth adding to pkgsrc-wip for people to test.

Do you know if any other distributions are using it?

Thanks

David