Hi list, The following a classical tale of an open source model success. This software would have never amounted to anything if certain ground rules layed by "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" were not followed.
A few months ago (November 28th 2006, to be precise), Nadav Ha'rel asked on this list about a tool for running an unprivileged program, but still allowing it to bind to privileged ports. You can follow the original question, as well as a few suggested solutions, at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg46096.html. I have made an attempt to summarize the suggestions raised at my post http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg46106.html. As the result of that discussion, I wanted to prove that my idea on how to implement this, while totally crazy, and only appeals to deranged individuals, is doable. Either that, or I wanted to prove I'm a deranged individual. Either way, I opened a sourceforge project and started actually coding the solution. Yeah, I know. Crazy, AND it was someone else's problem. While I don't think I got any saner, the SEP issue did get the best of me. With most of the code in place, but not actually running, I sort of gave up on the project. All the code was still available from sourceforge, but no release as the code did not, in actuality, run. I posted to this list saying "I did something, but not enough". Read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg46661.html At that point Amos Shapira contacted me, and said he had some time. I gave him commit access to the code, and he branched it and started hacking away at it. At some point, however, he ran out of time too. A couple of weeks ago Nadav got around to finally read my announcement from Janurary, and look at the code. His email reads along the lines of: 1. I checked out the code, opened the source, and saw that, more or less, everything was implemented but the last few bits. 2. Before I started implementing the last few bits, I checked out the branch, and saw it had those last few bits 3. This program is ready, why didn't you release it? As you can imagine, our reply was "here's administration access to the project. Why don't YOU release it?" Following that discussion we created a mailing list for the project, and started discussing further improvements. The time, however, has come to start showing something for our time. So, under the title of "release *early*, release often", I am glad to announce version 0.1 of privbind is available for download from the source forge site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/privbind. Please direct all bugs and feature requests to the project's mailing list. Share and enjoy, Shachar ================================================================= 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]
