Andrei, Liam, thanks for the replies!

...

However, this ceased to exist from one day to another a few months ago. What's the reason for this (and in general, where can I find announcements or discussions for such actions)?

You need to ask project maintainers, but I guess the usual reason is - it takes time and effort to maintain backward compatibility, it complicates packaging so ...

OK, but who are/were the maintainers? About backward compatibility see below.

Pandoc 3.0 was released earlier this year. Specifically, 2023-01-18:

https://pandoc.org/releases.html

Could it have been around then?

Probably, yes. The last version I got from openSUSE's Haskell repository was 2.19.2 (released August 2022).

...

And what is a proper substitute for it?

Pandoc is alive and well. Releases are on Github:

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases

I don't see RPM but I mainly use it on Debian-family distros and macOS. Perhaps you can install the `.deb` with the `alien` command? I've done that on openSUSE in the past.

Thanks. I've had a closer look and now see that this the mentioned link provides a static binary (with a size of a whopping 134MByte!), and it seems to work fine according to my first tests. It doesn't provide all functionality non-static build offers, though. In general it really makes me wonder why there isn't a single openSUSE distribution that has a recent Pandoc version at all, not even Tumbleweed, according to https://software.opensuse.org/package/pandoc – Pandoc 3.0, for example, was released in January 2023, and the newest release is 3.1.3 (from June 2023). In other words, it seems there are more problems than just backward compatibility. Static binaries for everything can't be the solution, can it? Werner

On Thu, 08 Jun 2023 04:32:25 +0000 (UTC), Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> wrote:

In general it really makes me wonder why there isn't a single openSUSE distribution that has a recent Pandoc version at all, not even Tumbleweed, according to https://software.opensuse.org/package/pandoc – Pandoc 3.0, for example, was released in January 2023, and the newest release is 3.1.3 (from June 2023).  In other words, it seems there are more problems than just backward compatibility.  Static binaries for everything can't be the solution, can it?

What is this (on Tumbleweed 20230601)?: === zypper if ghc-pandoc Loading repository data... Reading installed packages... Information for package ghc-pandoc: ----------------------------------- Repository     : Main Repository (OSS) Name           : ghc-pandoc Version        : 3.1.2-1.3 Arch           : x86_64 Vendor         : openSUSE Installed Size : 46.4 MiB Installed      : Yes (automatically) Status         : up-to-date Source package : ghc-pandoc-3.1.2-1.3.src Upstream URL   : https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pandoc Summary        : Conversion between markup formats Description    :     Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another.     The formats it can handle include     - light markup formats (many variants of Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc,     Org-mode, Muse, Textile, txt2tags) - HTML formats (HTML 4 and 5) - Ebook     formats (EPUB v2 and v3, FB2) - Documentation formats (GNU TexInfo, Haddock) -     Roff formats (man, ms) - TeX formats (LaTeX, ConTeXt) - Typst - XML formats     (DocBook 4 and 5, JATS, TEI Simple, OpenDocument) - Outline formats (OPML) -     Bibliography formats (BibTeX, BibLaTeX, CSL JSON, CSL YAML, RIS) - Word     processor formats (Docx, RTF, ODT) - Interactive notebook formats (Jupyter     notebook ipynb) - Page layout formats (InDesign ICML) - Wiki markup formats     (MediaWiki, DokuWiki, TikiWiki, TWiki, Vimwiki, XWiki, ZimWiki, Jira wiki,     Creole) - Slide show formats (LaTeX Beamer, PowerPoint, Slidy, reveal.js,     Slideous, S5, DZSlides) - Data formats (CSV and TSV tables) - PDF (via external     programs such as pdflatex or wkhtmltopdf)     Pandoc can convert mathematical content in documents between TeX, MathML, Word     equations, roff eqn, typst, and plain text. It includes a powerful system for     automatic citations and bibliographies, and it can be customized extensively     using templates, filters, and custom readers and writers written in Lua. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I installed pandoc-cli (0.1.1-2.2), and it currently requires ghc-pandoc >= 3.0 . -- Robert Webb

On Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:18:43 +0000 (UTC) Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> wrote:

...

...

In general it really makes me wonder why there isn't a single openSUSE distribution that has a recent Pandoc version at all, not even Tumbleweed, according to https://software.opensuse.org/package/pandoc [...]

...

Information for package ghc-pandoc: [...]

I installed pandoc-cli (0.1.1-2.2), and it currently requires ghc-pandoc >= 3.0 .

D'oh, thanks. I didn't know that it got renamed and split into multiple packages.

But again, this is not available for 15.4. I'll wait for the release of 15.5 and then check again.

If you type pandoc into the search box on the web page it lists a whole bunch of pandoc-related packages, but it might have been helpful for there to be a note actually on the page if a package has been split and the current one is therefore somewhat obsolete?

Werner