Update December 2008 Ashley <amigo@ibiblio.org>
The maintainer/developer of the original installwatch library has
begun working on installwatch again. Most of the changes which
I made to libsentry have been included in the official installwatch
souurces. Plus, he completed some work that I had not yet finished
and these changes have been backported to the libsentry sources
as of version 0.6.7.5.

	December 24 2007 Gilbert Ashley <amigo@ibiblio.org>
	libsentry/sentry is a fork of the installwatch library
	released under the GNU General Public License Version 2

After extensive modifications of the original installwatch library and
exectuable wrapper, I have forked installwatch to the new name:
libsentry/sentry. I did this only after being unable to reach the current
maintainer of installwatch Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran.
The program has had no official updates for about 5 years and the
last changes made by the maintainer appear to have been made around
June 2001. I have taken pactches from many sources and written some
fixes myself and plan to continue updating the library and program.
To avoid any conflicts with versioning and to avoid the installwatch
maintainer from receiving questions about any unofficial versions,
I decided to simply fork the project. This is not meant to distract from
the efforts of the original author Pancrazio `Ezio' de Mauro , nor the
work of Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran.

Actually, credit for the most significant changes since 2001 goes to
Olivier Fleurigeon <olivier.fleurigeon@cegedim.fr>, who did a major
re-write of nearly the entire program in November 2002. This work
was what constituted the official installwatch-0.7.0beta1 version.
Other contributors added small patches whcih corrected small errors
in that code, but some errors remained unfixed in the official version.
I found patches from SusE linux, Source Mage Linux, debian and others
which fixed most of the outstanding problems. However, meanwhile new
problems crept in related to compiling against versions of glibc>=2.5
and used with versions of coreutils>=6.7. The current maintainer of
installwatch posted a note on the official installwatch mailing-list
and webpage in August 2007 promising a fix for these problems. But,
as of December 2007, nothing more has been heard of these fixes. I
tried, unsuccessfully, to contact the maintainer in December 2007,
as my program 'src2pkg' depends heavily on the functionality of this
library. Finally, I took matters into my own hands and sought help
to adapt the library for use with newer glibc and coreutils. I was
able to resolve several issues and add new functionality with the
help of a Linux From Scratch user, who chose to remain anonymous.
he provided a valuable boiler-plate of code for adapting the library
to use the so-called 'openat' functions of glibc. Building on his
example code I have been able to expand the functionality and have
made other fixes as well.

For now, at least, the sources contain a complete record, in the form
of individual patches, of all the changes since installwatch-0.6.3.
Some of the patches are from individuals whose work may, or may not,
have been incorporated into the official installwatch versions. The
original version of libsentry can be considered to be built on
installwatch-0.7.0beta5, although the patches have been split up, or
combined so that each patch implements a complete feature or fixup.
Most patches have a text entry at the top which tells what the patch
is for and who provided the original patch. If you recognize code in
the patches that you wrote and feel that you have been excluded from
the credits, please notify me at amigo@ibiblio.org so that I can
rectify the error. This library and program would not be possible
without the work of all who contributed and my purpose in forking
the code is simply to further the work with my own efforts and those
of anyone else interested and capable of helping.