On Sun, Mar 18, 2007, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: Using the code of dead project - Political question": > Nadav Har'El wrote: > > As someone with a bit of experience with dead projects (I wrote one, > > sendSMS), I think the answer is yes: you can, and should, fork the project. > > (by the way, any takers for SendSMS? ;-)) > > > What would you prefer. Someone forking SendSMS, calling it, say, > "SendSMSStillAlive", or someone taking over the existing SendSMS? I > think the later is better. Shifting maintainers is not a rude word.
The latter is better, but requires a lot of cooperation between the old and new maintainer, which in many cases simply won't happen. One obvious problem is most dead code (and SendSMS is just an example that interests me personally) still works, or at least, large parts of it still work. The old maintainer doesn't want to support it any more, but still wants people to be able to use the old code, for what it still works for. If a new maintainer comes along and takes over the project completely, if the new guy is a lousy maintainer, he can actually do more harm than good, and make the project completely unusable, as opposed to just half unusable... So before letting someone officially take control of your code, you'd probably want to make sure about the qualifications and intentions of the new maintainer. Just letting someone fork your code - with the old code still available and the new code also available - is much easier as a "default" action. Of course, if the cooperation is possible (it is in SendSMS - just mail me if you want to be the new maintainer ;)), then cooperating and changing the maintainer of the original project is better. -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Mar 18 2007, 28 Adar 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I had a lovely evening. Unfortunately, http://nadav.harel.org.il |this wasn't it. - Groucho Marx ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
