source questions & intentions to patch: yp-timing & auth

Good Day,

Looking at the SVN repo: there's 30+ commits since the 2.6.2 release;
the last one from August 2009. Are there any intentions to roll a
release anytime soon? Are there any more recent branches?

I'm currently looking into extending icecast2 (more below) and am
wondering if I should base the patches on 2.6.2+debian-fixes or
work from svn-trunk?


We are using a cluster of icecast servers as decentralized
stream-servers for theartcollider.org project and rely on the
yellow-pages protocol to gather information about available streams/servers.

Basically I'm interested in
  (1) making YP timing configurable (more frequent updates <30sec)
  (2) adding a decentralized authentication mechanism: a user can use
  the same login for a set of mounts on all servers in the cluster

I've tackled (1) already and am pondering (2):

The current per-mounpoint auth requires a pre-defined mountpoint as well
as sharing the config-file among all servers. I do envisage an
authentication mechanism that can can be shared among a group of servers
and allows dynamic allocations of mountpoints/credentials.

It'd be very cool to use OAuth for that but it'd break compatibility
with too many source-clients.. so the current idea is to patch icecast2
to call an external service/executable in order to verify access (most
flexibile) and/or make icecast perform a HTTP request to an auth-server
that returns 200 or 403 (most portable).

Did anyone venture down this road before?

TIA,
robin