[Ctags-devel] Future of ctags

[Frank F. <ff...@us...>]

Dear Darren,

We know you are going through a tough time in your life and we fully
understand that ctags is not the top priority on your list.
Nevertheless we hope you have the time to discuss the future of this
project with us.

At this moment not much is happening in the official exuberant ctags
project. Very few SVN check-ins, little traffic on the mailing list.
The project appears to have stalled. But all the GNU/Linux
distributions mention this project as upstream. Exuberant ctags is
still a strong name!

A couple of developers, most of them subscribed to this list, want to
keep the development of ctags alive. Since we don't have access to the
SVN we decided to contribute to the most active repository on github
https://github.com/fishman/ctags This started as a simple personal
fork of the SVN repo (including all the history) but has grown heavily
over the last couple of months. We believe a lot of good things are
being done in this repository and think all the work done justifies a
the release of ctags v6.0. Obviously the repo is kept up-to-date with
the current SVN. No work is lost.

As a next step we would like to create a github organization and
convert the personal repository into the new official upstream
repository. We gladly add you as admin of that organization. This way
everything that has been going on in this repo is saved. After that
the final work can be done to prepare the release.

I am writing on behalf of the developers at "fishman". We really hope
you have time to discuss this with us. Please know that all we want is
to keep *this* project alive, but to accomplish that we need your
help!

To see the most important changes we created a changelog:
https://github.com/fishman/ctags/blob/master/docs/f-news.rst
We also kept track of the issues mentioned here and in other places
that we addressed:
https://github.com/fishman/ctags/blob/master/docs/f-tracking.rst

Kind regards,
Frank Fesevur

PS. This mail has been sent to the ctags-devel mailing list and BCC'ed
to Darren's personal address mentioned on his website. Sorry Darren,
that you receive it twice.