Re: [screen-devel] screen maintainer

[Jostein Berntsen]

On 02.04.14,18:43, Axel Beckert wrote:
> 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.

Many valid points there, Axel, and they are important to consider. But
it might seem like the development at the savannah repository is a bit
abandonded or have stalled, and that it is notoriously hard to get a new
release of screen. I applied for membership at the savannah development
site, but did not hear anything. And the savannah Gnu Screen site actually
links to Amadeusz' github site as an active development branch:

https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/screen/

So what do you suggest we should do to get a new release of Screen? I
believe that is important to keep this great program alive, and that we need
a new solution to keep the development vital.

Jostein