PSE-L(_at_)mail(_dot_)professional(_dot_)org (Professional Software
Engineering) writes:
srb still VRFY's at cuci.nl:
"250 Stephen R. van den Berg <srb(_at_)hera(_dot_)cuci(_dot_)nl>"
Okay, his account still exists, but there's no way of knowing whether
he's still behind it, or is reading email sent to it.
Note also that his mail banner is:
"220 hera.cuci.nl ESMTP Sendmail 8.8.8/BuGless_2.02 ready at Wed, 28 Oct
1998 22:19:36 +0100"
(the thing to note is BuGless_2.02 - srb appears to be alive and well, and
since it is sendmail 8.8.8, the BuGless is recent).
Sendmail 8.8.8 was released last October. If anything, that speaks
_against_ his being at cuci, as sendmail 8.9.1 has been out since
the beginning of July of this year.
...
At 13:29 28-10-98 -0600, Matt Saroff wrote:
Actually, by this point, I would consider the patched 3.11 to be a full
relase, and work should behind on 3.12.
I would agree here.
However, a distribution not managed by srb should probably be given a
distinctly different release number identifier - such as 3.12pre1un (un for
unofficial).
Ick. I've been trying to contact Stephen precisely to avoid this.
Both amd (the free-source automounter) and CAP (the Columbia Appletalk
Package) went the 'unofficial patch' route, and they're both now
somewhere around 200. Yes, they're both much larger packages, but the
principle holds: unofficial releases just make things complicated.
Plus, if some people have a hard time getting their sysadmins to
install 3.11pre7 because its preceived to be a 'beta' release, how much
more difficult would it be to have them install an unofficial release?
Does he have any special copyright on procmail or can we elect someone to
take over and maintain the distribution?
I don't recall seeing explicit copyright messages anywhere, but I'm
positive I have not seen GNU licenses.
The relevant part of the README reads:
If you distribute it, please leave the package intact. You are
allowed to take parts from this distribution and distribute
these separately as long as you retain the copyright messages.
If you redistribute any part of this package in a modified
form, be sure to mark the parts you changed.
Does that mean that if I was to distribute a patched version of procmail,
I would have to include comments in each source file documenting my
changes, or would a mention in the HISTORY file be enough?
Anyway, here are my current plans: I'm going to be sending off a
snail-mail letter tomorrow to the address Stephen gave in the README
file requesting permission to take over maintainence and development of
procmail. I also plan on trying to call either him directly, or the
domain administrator of cuci.nl, though if someone in the Netherlands
were to do so before me, my checkbook would appreciate it. I
definitely think that we ought to find out what's up with Stephen
before anyone makes a release of their own.
Once we do know more, unless he [Stephen] announces an imminent
reappearance, I'm planning on making availible a "3.11pre8" release (or
whatever it gets called) incorporating fixes to the known bugs in
procmail (one in formail, the leading-newline regexp-match problem, a
buffer overflow in procmail's argument processing, and the
BSD-realloc() efficiency problem). If that appears to work for testers
I would then make a non-pre release and see if it can be incorporated
into software distributions like Redhat's, if just to stamp out 3.10.
After that, I'll be looking at some enhancements (more memory
managements changes, LMTP, SWITCHRC, PREMATCH, MIME splitting for
formail), but that's a ways away.
Does anyone else have a better idea?
Philip Guenther