From time to time, I end up having to convert .lit files (Microsoft Reader) into a different format, not to read them on my Sony Reader, but simply to display them on screen. The actual reason for this is that my mother finds stuff she likes in .lit format, and of course as I couldn’t find any decent GUI, in Italian, to convert them directly on OSX, I have to deal with them.
The package I use to do this conversion is app-text/convertlit (luckily Usata didn’t use the “clit” name that the zip file with the sources use).
What is the problem then? Well the problem is that the package has quite some problems. Upstream does not seem to be very alive, and the major of the work was done by the openclit library that I couldn’t find anywhere anymore.
The code could certainly use some cleanup: it uses libtommath, nothing bad in that, but it’s the only package in my whole system using it, and feels like a bit of a waste, considering it’s used for DRM’d lit files, which I never have to deal with. Having it optionally use gmp (which I think is quite more common on modern systems, considering gcc depends on it in 4.3 series) would be intriguing.
Also, it currently implements DES decryption and SHA1 checksumming… again, it’s wasteful to re-implement what is already available in common libraries.
If anybody has free time to work on this it would probably be a nice project to help people going away from proprietary software. I’m around if you need some help with autotools…
