Re: [vchkpw] Re: Tom's fork of vpopmail (and qmailadmin)

[Nick Harring]

Rick Romero wrote: On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 12:30, Tom Collins wrote: On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 10:07 AM, Ken Jones wrote: Just so everyone knows. Tom Collins is attempting to fork the vpopmail project. He refuses to let me share ownership of the vpopmail and qmailadmin projects on source forge. When I asked him to add me as an owner on the project he said he refuses now and at any time in the future to allow me to share ownership. I have forked ownership since I felt that Inter7 was doing a poor job of maintaining vpopmail and qmailadmin. I readily acknowledge that Ken created vpopmail and qmailadmin. They're GPL projects, so I'm free to fork them if I like. Since moving the projects to SourceForge, we've kept up with submitted patches and bug reports. I feel that making the move was beneficial to the projects themselves and the people that use them. I would agree. <snip> Ken Jones hasn't contributed to vpopmail and qmailadmin development since March. We've had 12 qmailadmin releases and 7 vpopmail releases since then. Managing the projects on SourceForge keeps everything out in the open, and allows anyone to contribute. Perhaps it'd be valid for the vpopmail community to ask Ken why he hasn't been active in contributing, hasn't openly objected to any of the sucession of patches and release, and now suddenly is muddying the waters with this issue. When a projects developement seems to die out, a new person should be able to pickup the slack and keep things moving. If Ken has an issue with that, it'd probably behoove him to let us know why he waited, and where he'd see things going from now. IMHO, I think Ken can bring a little more stability to the devel releases. Yes, we KNOW it's a development release, but some of the Changelog entries show a lack of, umm, a polished release. Now, while I didn't have a problem merging my hacks into the latest inter7 devel version, I have yet to grab a sourceforge version simply BECAUSE there are so many releases. I think that may cause problems with testing 5.2.2 in a production environment. While updates from Inter7 were sparse, I definitely felt comfortable running the current devel version. Ken hasn't stated why he wants to be an owner of the project. I'm not sure I understand what he loses out on by being a developer on the project and not an admin. I would call it plain old common courtesy. Nobody wants to see a power struggle, or two vpopmail/qmailadmin projects, but a lot of people are doing great things with these two projects. I find it somewhat unprofessional to fork the project using the same names at sourceforge, and hijack the mailing lists in an effort to steer everyone towards your fork. I hardly see any evidence of mail list hijacking. Instead I see Tom continually pitching in to help people with their problems, contributing patches, and generally trying to be courteous and helpful all over the place. The only contentiousness I've seen is just now in relation to giving Ken admin rights on sourceforge. I certainly see Ken's point that its his software, and while the license allows for forks, general courtesy would require that the fork not be called vpopmail. Regardless of who is leading developement, as a user I'd like to remind everyone that the 5.3.x series really ought to heading towards a stable release. New features are great, but they're only pushing out the timeframe in which most of us can accept a release as production ready and get to use some of those new features in real environments. If Ken is going to be the person to get 5.4 out the door, then we need him to be given the chance to take a more active role in leading his own project. If he doesn't feel he can be that person, or doesn't wish to, perhaps he should lead the charge on 5.5 while Tom gets 5.3 to the point of becoming 5.4? IMHO if you're going to be King, change your project names (so you don't appear to be intentionally confusing newbies), and don't use this mailing list. Rick -- Tom Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] QmailAdmin: http://qmailadmin.sf.net/ Vpopmail: http://vpopmail.sf.net/ Info on the Sniffter hand-held Network Tester: http://sniffter.com/ Ultimately, I'm going to track whichever code base appears most stable, as new features aren't a big deal in my environment. I'm going to mitigate that with also taking the stance that I need to be able to trust the leader of the fork to act in the best interests of the user base, in terms of stability, new features, and an open developement model. Right now that would tend to be Tom, but Ken has only just begun the dialogue, so many he'll be able to settle all of this with what he has to say. Cheers, Nick Harring