Re: project status?

[Greg Troxel]

"Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@kitchenlab.org> writes:

> I "maintain" spamass-milter for FreeBSD Ports (I use quotations because
> there's really not a whole lot to do).  Our entry for spamass-milter
> tracks the last release from savannah, with the addition of two patches
> from the andybalholm repo.  I'd certainly be open to changing that
> arrangement if appropriate and beneficial.

I also don't do much, but the state of upstream is uncomfortable so I'm
looking around.

We have 0.4.0 from savannah plus a man page patch I think taken from
FreeBSD, to document the a flag, to not scan messages from authenticated
users.  (But apparently the flag itself is in 0.4.0?)

> My experience with dormant open-source projects like this is that
> getting some kind of official word/statement may be difficult.  I think
> it's up to us as representatives of different operating systems to
> decide which repository to track, whether to backport patches from one
> to another, etc.  Admittedly my current approach is pretty much one of
> "least effort", which might not be what you want to do.  :-)

I agreed it's often tricky.  I think we have firmly established that the
savannah project is non-functional.

If Andy is willing to look at pull requests and hit merge, and perhaps
generate a release tag, that sounds like a big improvement over where we
are now.  I suppose we could ask to be handed the savannah project, but
I don't really want to maintain it - just to have a common place for
fixes as they arise, so we can more easily steal each other's work.

I would like to hear from other packagers (Debian? FC?) about their
approach, too.