On Aug 23, 2006, at 5:52 AM, imacat wrote:
Ovid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
No names, but if you happen to be sitting on a module which other
people depend on and you're not going to fix bugs, give up the
module, offer someone co-maintainership or figure out *something*
which gives users a way out. I realize that not everyone has a
pile of free time to constantly upgrade and maintain modules, but
if it's something widely used and you don't have time for it,
isn't the responsible thing to find a way to get those bug fixes
out there?
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I think the author has the
prerogative to lose interest, or die, or run out of time, or
whatever, without being branded as evil by the community. The fact
that they made their contribution in the first place, and people
found it useful, seems like it should be honored rather than vilified.
That said, there ought to be a way for the community to move forward
without having the original author be the bottleneck. With open-
source licenses, there's explicitly a way for someone else in the
community to pick up the reins and release a "derivative" of the
original code without seeking the permission of the original author:
JFDI. Change the namespace if you must. People will cope, it's
better than having no new release at all.
Having a "name and shame" mentality about this is IMO wrong. Having
old dead code out there with no recent releases is as much the fault
of the community as it is of the original author - the one person in
the scenario who actually released code.
But this ain't right. Crypt-Cracklib is critical to security and
user management, Crypt-Rijndael is the current US governmental
standard
encryption algorithm, and x86_64 is the contemporary architech. It's
just not right that they don't work.
I'm not a skilled C/XS programmer, or I would consider taking over
them. Can anybody have advice on this issue?
Yeah: find a skilled C/XS programmer and fix it. What other solution
could there possibly be?
If the maintainers are as unresponsive as you seem to be saying,
consider them dead. They may even *be* dead. But their code should
serve as a damn good blueprint for you to get something working.
-Ken
