December 24 2007 Gilbert Ashley 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 , 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.