[gopher] Re: Forking UMN gopher?

[David Allen <s2mdalle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 12:00:38PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> David Allen <s2mdalle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > I'm not clear on who else is working on it.  Who is the 'official'
> > maintainer of it?  I know that you're the debian package maintainer,
> > but if you're also the maintainer, we're not forking.  :)
> 
> The official maintainer is University of Minnesota.  Except for a
> small security fix, they have been inactive on it since 1995.

Wow.  Do they have any information out there about actually being the
maintainer, or are they only the maintainer since nobody can think of
anybody else?  I.e. is it orphanware?  Sounds to me like a fork would
be appropriate, but if there's anybody left at UMN that wants to put
anything into it, we should try to get them involved with this.

> > Sorry for the barrage of questions...I just didn't know that forking
> > was going to be an issue.
> 
> Well, the question is this -- if we are going to be putting serious
> work into it, and it looks like we are, then it makes sense to start
> versioning it, making releases, etc. like a real project.  IE, 2.3.2,
> 2.4.0, whatever.  When a project is active, distributing a diff that
> gets revved periodically is rather confusing to the users (well,
> anyone that doesn't run Debian.)  So, essentially it's a fork but the
> other prong doesn't exist :-)

Ah.  Well, a distinctly unforkish fork is fine with me.  I'd just
like to make sure it is clear to anybody who sees it that it's not being done
out of difference of opinion or different design ideas, and that the
original author as well as anybody else is welcome to join in.

Just out of curiosity, how big are the diffs now?  We may not have
diverged all that much, since I can imagine hundreds of lines of diff
that are only due to me cleaning code up, rather than actually
changing anything.

-- 
David Allen
http://opop.nols.com/
----------------------------------------
"The first lesson in activism is that the person that offers to get the 
dynamite is always the FBI agent" 
        -- Judi Bari