[flac-dev] Status of flac; new release?

[Max Horn]

In partial response to myself:

On 29.11.2012, at 16:36, Max Horn wrote:

[...]
> 1) Is there any chance the website could be updated? A minimal update would already have a tremendous impact: Just a blurb on the start page that the project is not dead, and a pointer to the new repos and maybe this list / its archive. That way, it would at least be clear where to search for current information.
> 
> Of course a more thorough update would be nice on the long run, but also much more work would be needed, and I don't know if you have anybody who can take care of it. But the minimal update should be a matter of well less than half an hour work or so, right? If you point me to the sources of the website, I'd even be happy to whip up a patch.

OK, so I just discovered this, partially answering my question:

  http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2012-August/003436.html

But this raises several new questions: The term "scraping" and the rest sound to me as if you don't have write access to the SF.net project, and have not yet asked Josh Coalson about that. I find that odd... To me, it seems only the following 3 options are on the table:

1) If Josh is still active, he should be involved in this already now.
2) If he is not active, then he should be kindly asked to grant such access to a person he trusts; if he doesn't want to be active at all anymore, he should even grant that person admin rights, so that person can take over stewardship.
3) If he is not reachable at all anymore (i.e. no reply to emails after some weeks or so), then a support request should be filed with SF.net to take over the SF.net "flac" project...

At least that's what I'd consider normal procedure, based on over a decade working in the OSS realm in general, and with SF.net in particular :-). But I don't mean to tell you how to run this project, just sayin'...

Anyway: Once you have access to the SF.net project, you can get the original website source, instead of having to rely on scraping. Also, a redirect from xiph.sf.net to the new location can be setup right away. In particular, I don't see why an update of the website would have to wait till a release is necessary. Quite to the contrary, I think such an update should happen as soon as possible. At least it would have saved me some hours of work investigating the current state of flac :-).

Cheers,
Max