snacc for Debian
----------------

Help appreciated:

1. Snacc is an old-style-ASN.1 compiler, a lot of people even say it's
   totally obsolete.  I don't think it's reasonable to hack on it to
   make it compliant with the latest ASN.1 standards.  ASN.1 has
   changed a lot, has a lot of new features (object information
   classes, constraints, parameterisation) and additional encoding
   rules (PER - Packed Encoding Rules, XER - XML Encoding Rules.  The
   upcoming ECN (encoding control notation) will even give the user
   complete control over the encoding.  Therefore, a completely new,
   all-purpose, free ASN.1 compiler is needed.  If you have written
   one, please drop me a letter - I would be happy to package it for
   Debian GNU/Linux.

   Note (2008): asn1c is packaged for Debian.

2. The snacc development has split up since 1997:

   2.1 The root-of-all-snacc is by M. Sample and G. Neufeld, later
       maintained by R. Joop and later by S. Wangnick.  The last
       version has been called 1.3b4, AFAIK.  The last ChangeLog entry
       is from 1997-09-16.  I tried to contact the original authors,
       but never got any sign of life.

   2.2 BBN Technologies changed the build process of this version to
       use GNU automake and libtool and fixed some things.  The Debian
       package uses this version, because it builds easily.  The
       Debian package adds the examples from older snacc versions.
       Good work, but please update the ChangeLog next time :-) They
       called their version 1.3 - I renamed it to 1.3bbn, to avoid
       confusion with the old 1.3 version.  The last ChangeLog entry
       is from 1997-10-10.  Some people seem to use and enhance this
       version heavily, e.g.  see bug report #202593 by Kai Henningsen
       <kai@lisbeth2.intern.cats.ms>.

   2.3 DigitalNet (formerly Getronics Government Solutions (formerly
       J.G. Van Dyke & Associates, Inc)) changed snacc in parallel:
       They added support for DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) and
       some string types.  Their branch is called eSNACC.
       Unfortunately - last I checked - they don't use GNU automake
       and libtool, but some proprietary build techniques (*.dsw and
       *.dsp files), so this version does not build as cleanly as BBNs
       under UNIX.  Also, they renamed files, ingnoring the GNU coding
       standard, e.g. they renamed `ChangeLog', `NEWS', `README' and
       everything else to all lower-case.  They even renamed all .C
       files into .cpp.  The latest version is 1.5.1 from 2003-05.
       But they do not update the ChangeLog, so the last entry is from
       1997-09-16.  Download it from
       http://www.digitalnet.com/knowledge/snacc_lib.htm, source:
       http://www.digitalnet.com/knowledge/snacc_lib/esnacc-1.5.1.tgz.

   2.4 There is also a "Snacc for Java" (by IBM, I think).  I don't
       know anything about it.

   It would be worthwhile to re-integrate the approaches 2.2 and 2.3.
   OTOH, it would be a lot of work, better spend with 1., see above.

3. The Debian build of snacc leaves out the ASN.1 tree viewer/editor.
   If anybody needs it and is able to compile the latest version of
   the Tcl/Tk tree widget with latest version of Tcl/Tk, please
   package it.  Or better, write a new one, based on 1. and PyGTK.

 -- W. Martin Borgert <debacle@debian.org>, 2003-08-10T08:15+0000