I discovered a new program that I enjoy called Featherpad (a QT based text editor). When I opened it I noticed that some features were missing, and then realized that Fedora 32 had a rather old version of the program 0.9.3 where as the current version is 0.15.1. I was a little surprised by that since Fedora tends to have the latest versions of FOSS especially when compared to other distributions.
It shows a number of automated bug reports showing the version bumps that have occurred many of them in 2020 (I guess the lead developer is actively updating this program). Is there anything that I can do to bring attention to this program, or is this package maintained by someone who is no longer active in the Fedora Community?
I have no experience in creating an RPM or packaging for Fedora, but if it is an orphaned package perhaps that would be the next course of action or just wait for the package to be adopted by a new package maintainer. If there is something positive that I can do as a community member other than learning to package RPM’s and joining the Fedora Packaging team let me know. Thanks.
First thing you can do is commenting on the existing bug report to ask the maintainer what his update plans are. Sometimes there are technical reasons for packages not getting updated.
Thank you @lcts for the advice. I have commented on the existing bug report, and offered to do some testing of the newest version. I didn’t want to add to the “noise” on the bug report, unless it was deemed helpful which you seemed to indicate that it would be. Have a great day!
Similar to the “too many distributions” waste of resources, the user space application packaging for each distro brings little value usually.
But at least there is a solution: you can ask the developer to create a Flatpak. It will allow most distributions to install Featherpad (and get updates)
It may already have AppImage, Snap … Then you can use these directly too.
Fedora has the latests versions of the kernel and other structural components like systemd, Gnome, Pipewire … that remains true and valuable packaging.