Ubuntu
corkscrew package

Is corkscrew still maintained?

Asked by Matthew Davis

I want to use corkscrew to tunnel TCP traffic other than SSH.
The Wikipedia page for corkscrew [1] says corkscrew can tunnel arbitrary TCP, but next to that it says [citation needed].
I want to find out whether this is possible, and if so, how. If not, I want to modify corkscrew to make this possible.
But I'm worried that this project is no longer maintained. Is it?

The Ubuntu page for the corkscrew package says the home page is agroman.net, but there's nothing at that page [3].

On Github I can find two corkscrew repos, [4] and [5]. [4] seems to be a copy of [5], since bryanpkc noticed that agroman.net went down, and wanted to keep a copy. [5] has no Issues tab, and the 3 pull requests have been open for up to 2 years.

Neither repo has had a commit made within the last 2 years. And the main .c file itself has never been updated since the first commit in 2009. [6]

The email address listed in the copyright page for Corkscrew on [2] mentions Pat Padgett <email address hidden>, which is an email address that no longer works. (Since the domain ownership has lapsed.)

What's the status of this project?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corkscrew_(program)
[2] https://packages.ubuntu.com/groovy/corkscrew
[3] http://agroman.net/corkscrew/
[4] https://github.com/bryanpkc/corkscrew
[5] https://github.com/patpadgett/corkscrew
[6] https://github.com/patpadgett/corkscrew/blob/master/corkscrew.c

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Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/corkscrew/+changelog

Yes it seems so.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Davis (matt-davis) said : 		#2

I'm trying to read that changelog.

It looks like each "release" is just the same version of corkscrew for a new version of Ubuntu.
e.g. The release for hirsute (i.e. a version of Ubuntu first drafted in 2020) is version 2.0-11, which was uploaded in 2016 [1].

Is hirsute just using the same copy-pasted code from the previous Ubuntu releases? i.e. it's not maintained?

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hirsute/+source/corkscrew

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#3

The packages in Ubuntu were copied form Debian without Ubuntu-specific modifications.
In Debian the situation seems to be the same.

Quite from Debian https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/corkscrew
action needed
 Problems while searching for a new upstream version
uscan had problems while searching for a new upstream version:
In watchfile debian/watch, reading webpage
  http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew/ failed: 404 Not Found

It seems that the old source repository does not exist any more and the original author cannot be reached.

My assumption is:
Either the Debian maintainers switch to the new github repository to use it as new source, or in future Debian and Ubuntu releases that package will no more be available.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Matthew Davis for more information if necessary.

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