[sane-devel] why hasn't there been a release in a long time ?

[m. allan noah]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> wrote:
> "m. allan noah" <kitno455 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>> I personally will take the great measure of responsibility for this
>> problem. My time has become very limited since I took over the job of
>> making releases. I have also allowed the confusion around a new API
>> prevent us from moving forward with maintenance releases, even though
>> that is an unrelated issue.
>
> It's not all on you, Allan, far from it. The greater issue is that a
> number of backend maintainers have just dropped the ball and most of
> those left pretty much only care about their backend, which is already
> very nice of them (I mean it - not any kind of snarky remark
> here). The current active backend maintainers are doing a great job with
> their backends, but that's not enough.
>
> And for anyone who'd want to care about SANE in a global manner, the
> number of backends is really a problem. Too many backends, too many old,
> obsolete, crappy backends nobody cares about that all need to be
> included in whatever SANE-wide effort one would want to start.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but your comments prove that my
second point is correct. We have allowed ourselves to stall releases
of updated code, because we keep talking about our hopes for the
future API. I believe Gerhard warned about this months (years?) ago,
that we should really properly prepare for maintenance releases. My
now ancient idea of 'sneaking' new features into sane 1.0 only made
things worse, because we have this debate before every release.

Also, while I do agree with you on the 'performance' of some
maintainers, this IS a volunteer effort, and people change. We need to
move on, and find new maintainers if possible.

allan
-- 
"The truth is an offense, but not a sin"