flexfax: Whose looking after Hylafax?

[Damian A Ivereigh <damian@cisco.com>]

Would the Hylafax maintainer please stand up!

Having seen the same question (egcs problem), posted onto the mailing
list over and over again, when is this going into the release? What
about all the other patches too (e.g. the tag-line patch)?

We have been on the same official revision (4.0pl2) for at least the
last 9 months. The www.hylafax.org site has been setup (which is great
- but where are your names? - I know Robert Colquhoun is one of them),
but it still just gives a list of patches to apply. Still no new
release.

David Woolley must spend half his waking life answering questions on
the mailing list - he does a sterling effort, but wastes much time
with the same questions again and again. No new release to permanently
squash the problems.

Darren Nickerson did a great job putting together the RPM for Hylafax
- but what does he do? Take the original source and apply all the
juicy patches to it.

I notice there is flexfax-announce mailing list. It advertises itself
as "low volume". No kidding, I don't remember anything coming off it -
except maybe the announcement of the new web site.

Look guys is this stuff Open Source/Free Software or what? What
happened to the release early and release often model (aka Bazaar
model)?

My understanding is that Sam Leffler, who originally wrote most of the
code, no longer had the time or the inclination to continue. It seems
he nominated Mathias, be he doesn't have the time to do it either - or
at that is how it appears. This is fine, however he must designate a
new maintainer. 

I see a lot of good, talented & motivated people running around this
list. I think it is time we moved forward. If not, I think it is time
we did the unthinkable and forked the code.

So guys I think it is time for Hylafax 4.1! Take all those patches -
shove them in there and just shove it up on the Hylafax web site. If
not, I'm going to put it up on mine. It will create lots of confusion
and hassle, but if its the only way to start this project moving
again, it'll be worth it.

Its a testament to the quality of the code, that it is still being
used despite that lack of maintenance. There is obviosly lots of
demand for it. Most code left like this would have died long ago.


Damian

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