Re: GNU Screen maintainer

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

I initially planned to not reply in this thread as I considered it
being too aggressive and hence should not be feeded. But since I've
been asked indirectly and the pace of this topic becomes faster and
more dangerous...

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 05:00:21PM +0100, Carsten Mattner wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 7:19 PM, Jostein Berntsen <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 21.02.14,10:27, Carsten Mattner wrote:
> > > Is there a GNU screen or maintainer or if there isn't shouldn't someone 
> > > else
> > > take the ball and start making releases?

While I agree that a new release surely would be a good thing, I don't
think we should urge the GNU Screen developers to do so. Asking if
they're planning to do a release soon is fine IMHO.

But if they think that it's not ready yet, it's ok. Some distributions
currently ship development snapshots of screen, at least Fedora and
Debian do. But that decision was taken by the maintainers of the
screen package of that distribution and on their risk.

I took that risk for Debian. It solved about 20 or 30 bugs reported
against screen in Debian, but also opened about 5 or 6 new bug
reports, including a nasty one around the protocol version bump. I
though think that's no bad ratio and still think it was worth it. But
I can understand if the Screen developers would like to have a better
ratio than this for a new official release.

> Can someone find out the project owner and mail them?

You just did. Twice. They are reading this list. At least they did in
those years since I took care of Debian's screen package.

> Maybe the distro maintainers should come together and take over
> maintenance of the project.

As one of the "distro maintainers" I don't think we should do so. I
don't see why and I don't see how, as our expertise about the
"upstream" code is in nearly all cases not as good as the one of the 
"upstream" developers.

You sound as if there was nothing happen at all in Screen, but that's
wrong. It is not a very active project, but a very mature one.
Nevertheless there's still happening something in the code every few
months, last commit 9 days ago (which is younger than the mail I'm
replying, too, yes, but it shows clearly that there _not_ nothing
happening):

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/log/

        Regards, Axel (Maintainer of the package "screen" in Debian)
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <address@hidden>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE
  `-    |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5