[Dump-announce] Dump/restore is looking for a new maintainer

[Stelian P. <st...@po...>]

Hello everybody,

It is probably obvious to all of you that I have been very silent
for some time now. The latest release of dump/restore was more than
3 years ago.

I should have written this announce long ago, but I guess it's not
easy to quit a project I have been working on for 15 years
(my first release of dump, 0.4b5, was released in September 1999 !).

I no longer have the time to work on dump anymore, and I'm not
sure dump as a tool still has a place in today's world. There are
die-hard admins who still use it, but maybe it's time for everybody
to move on.

Or not. Even if I don't really expect this to happen, maybe someone
will step up and take over the maintainership. Surprise me !

Dump's code is not the cleanest C code in the world (as a matter of
fact quite the opposite), but it is still interesting to study as it
was written in an age where code size and optimization meant something.
I did learn quite a few tricks from this code when I was a beginner
in programming, others could do as well.

I have long dreamed to re-write dump from scratch, keep the logic
and the tape format but throw away the historic dust. I'll leave
this on the TODO list for the new maintainer.

Thanks to everybody who sent patches, submitted bugs, posted on
the mailing lists, send me thank yous or complaints, or just simply
used dump/restore.

It has been fun.

Stelian.
-- 
Stelian Pop <st...@po...>