Re: qmail.org DEAD?

On 1 Jul 2019, at 18:44, Erwin Hoffmann wrote:

> However, just maintaining the content of some outdated software 
> repositories with a lot of broken links is certainly not enough.
>
> We need fresh start! (and a maintainer).

I can think of only two ways we might arrive at an active and agreed 
maintainer:

1. DJB announces progress on qmail 2
2. DJB names a successor

Maybe there are other ways. I suspect a more fruitful question is, how 
could we arrive at an active and agreed group of developers 
collaborating to ship sensible, trustworthy, seamless, and therefore 
sufficiently authoritative updates to qmail?

I don't know the answer to this question either, but I have some 
educated guesses:

- We choose our own little group (like the folks who chose each other to 
produce netqmail)
- Our starting point is the most recent netqmail
- Our revision control history is public (such as on GitHub), and our 
commits are emailed to a public list (probably a new one for the 
purpose)
- Our design discussions are public (such as on this list)
- Before changing or adding code, we ensure it's covered by automated 
tests
- Before fixing a bug, we write a regression test
- On every push, automated tests are run in public and their results are 
publicly available
- We ship the automated tests with the code, so users can run the tests 
on their own systems
- Over time, automated tests cover more of the system and get run on 
more and more platforms

Folks who have been part of open source projects, does this sound like 
it could work? What would you change, add, remove, or otherwise suggest?

Folks who wish there were sufficiently authoritative updates to qmail: 
does this sound like a development process you might be able to trust 
and that might produce updates you'd want to track?

> BTW: The outage of qmail.org (Russel Nelson's site) and DJB seems to 
> be orchestrated. DJB refers already to mirrors here:
> 	http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html

I don't think this is the case. The links to mirrored copies of the 
qmail tarball have been there for many years, and the link to 
www.qmail.org is still present.