Re: [screen-devel] screen maintainer

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 04:27:53PM +0200, Amadeusz Sławiński wrote:
> Some of you may know that I maintain separate development tree on github
> (https://github.com/amade/screen/tree/devel/src) in which I have a more
> than 300 changes committed in comparison with official tree. So I may
> as well do this officially ;)

I think the development of GNU Screen should stay on Savannah. Github
is not free software and hosting free software with non-free software is
always a dangerous thing, not only politically.

Surely, there's also Gitorious, Gitlab and Repo.or.cz, but I don't see
any advantage over Savannah other than that some of the are more
"agile" and "hip". (And I neither consider GNU Screen being agile nor
hip. I consider it to be mature and stable, despite some changes in
the past years, like bumping the protocol version between client and
server, reduced stability noticably.)

> * new features (256 colors in hardstatus, hardstatus on top,
> truecolor, ...)

Nice.

> * removal of ancient code (removed most of #ifdef for ancient
> systems)

Not happy.

I fear that this may cause a lot of breakage. Linux(*) is by far not
the only platform for Screen out there.

(*) You wrote earlier that you only tested your code on Linux. Linux
    is by far not the only platform, GNU Screen runs on.

> * removal of features which didn't seem useful or could be replaced

Not happy.

On which base did you decide that? I suspect that these kind of
changes will make many users unhappy, too.

Please list which features you removed, so that people at least have a
chance to object.

E.g. I know people who think the most important screen feature is it's
ability to talk to serial consoles. (One of the features, tmux doesn't
have btw.) And I fear that this is one of these underestimated
features which may easily be dropped by people who never needed them.

> First thing I would do, would be releasing current git tree as
> screen-4.1 also opening separate version 4 branch,

Your git tree or the one on Savannah? I hope you mean the one on
Savannah.

> only for bug fixes so distributions have something recent to base
> their packages on. Next step would be merging my 'devel' branch into
> master and start developing version 5.

Ok, this sound as least saner than I feared.

Anyway, since this topic seems to get into a more "dangerous" and
fast-paced state, I may sent some of my already written replies to
some of the earlier threads on that topic -- which I didn't send yet,
because I felt to angry to write calm mails at that point.

                Kind regards, Axel
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