On 2018-06-23 04:57, Marty E. Plummer wrote: > On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 09:50:50PM -0500, Marty E. Plummer wrote: >> So, as you may be aware I've been doing some work on moving bzip2 to an >> autotools based build. Recently I've ran into app-crypt/mhash, which is >> in a semi-abandoned state (talking with the maintainer on twitter atm), >> and I was thinking it may be a good idea to set up a project for keeping >> these semi-abandoned and really-abandoned libraries and projects up to >> date and such. >> >> Basically, an upstream for packages who's upstream is either >> uncontactable or is otherwise not accepting bug fixes and patches. So >> far I can only think of app-crypt/mhash and app-arch/bzip2 but I'm sure >> there are others in this state. >> > Or... call it proxy-upstream, to be in line with the current proxy-maint > setup?
Please do not call it proxy-*. The invented word proxymaintainer and proxiedmaintainer are not usefull. They get always mixed, and are not understood outside of Gentoo. assistant developer or trainee developer would have been much more useful. Beside the naming I like the idea, that you want to take care for all abandoned libs. Please note, that you can not generate more manpower by creating a project. In 2015 I calculated ===================================================== (Number of developers) / (Number of Projects) < 1.4 ===================================================== Which explains, why most projects today are run by mostly one active person. If you find an important library, where upstream is dead, fork it and take responsibility for it. It makes no sense to make a pool of dead and important software and delegate the responsibility to a team where nobody really knows the software. Better pick a library, communicate with maintainers of the other distributions and fork it. Keep the library alive in the fork. It is important for the security to let dead projects die. -- Best, Jonas
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