Re: GNU Screen maintainer

[Carsten Mattner]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 6:51 PM, Axel Beckert <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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...

I don't intend to sound aggressive and if I did or do in this email
please excuse me. Please tell me if my choice of words sounds
aggressive and I'll apologize and try to explain what I meant.

I'm only suggesting or asking the obvious which many wonder. Without
public replies from maintainers one has no choice but to publicly
speculate what's going on. Between the first and second time I brought
this up there has been enough (maybe a year) time and it's safe to
assume that it's either not seen by any maintainer or seen but not
reacted on because of missing resources.

> 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.

I tried screen in Fedora 16 and 17 and it segfaulted if you configured
maxwin 9 or maxwin 4. Don't know about the current state.

>> 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.

No response from anyone claiming to be a maintainer, so I asked more
than once. Emails get lost or ignored or forgotten about.

>> 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.

If the "distro maintainers" came together and contributed their
changes back like say the urxvt TERM length limit fix there'd be less
patches to carry and hopefully one upstream. Right now like id3lib
fixes are spread in linux distros but not in an official upstream
release. I don't believe that's a good idea or sign of a healthily
active project. That's my primary motivation for suggesting a
shared "distro maintainers" branch.

> 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/

Maybe I asked on the wrong list but I've seen projects with frequent
git commits but no interaction with users/contributors.