[Queue-developers] RFC - Future of GNU Queue

[Koni <mh...@co...>]

Hello all,

My name is Koni, I am interested to know what the plans and outlook is
for the future development of the GNU queue package. I've recently
attempted to contact the current maintainer Mike Castle through his
sourceforge contact address but there has been no response now over two
weeks.

The present release available through sourceforge does not compile on
recent Linux systems as I imagine many subscribers to this list already
know. I have resolved several compile and run-time issues with the
queue-stable branch on sourceforge and succeeded in making GNU queue run
on my small Linux cluster here in my lab at Cornell. Please see the
patch posted by sourceforge user "cryptopup" (me) in the patches section
for more information.

While queue runs on my systems here, it still has problems making
unsuitable still for general use in my lab. Since the sourceforge site
indicates the project has been essentially dormant for several years, I
decided to contact Dr. Krebs and Mr. Castle to figure out if it was
worth more of my time to work on fixing GNU queue to use for my needs
here, or whether or not I should look into something else or perhaps
even do my own thing.

In the meantime while I waited for a response from Mike, I read through
more of the GNU queue code. I have since decided to begin a de novo
development of my own system, inspired largely by what I like about how
GNU queue is intended to be used. Experimenting with ideas, I am now
nearly 3000 lines of code into this and I'm reasonably confident the
direction I am going will result in a robust and scalable system. I will
post a description of the design to this list shortly for your
reference.

Dr. Krebs, as well as Richard Stallman, have expressed their interest in
having me take over the development of GNU queue. As I am nearly ready
to start my own open-source project with the code base I have developed,
I am now writing to the broad community via this mailing list to raise
this issue. This is a community decision. I have no interest in
promoting myself here. Instead I am offering what I am doing to this
already established community that seems to be lacking active
development at the moment. The benefit for me is immediate gain of a
capable group of developers and user base to help take what is presently
a toy on my laptop to a respectable and broadly usable system that
achieves the goals of GNU queue.

I will be perfectly plain and upfront and say that if I am assigned the
responsibility for maintaining this project, I will first replace the
existing code base with my own. As developers, you should consider that
seriously. This will be a completely disruptive change. My intended path
of development is to complete the partially implemented system I have
now, and add features that are present in GNU queue (like tty emulation)
to my system by cribbing some of the existing code.

Again, I do not wish to preemptively take over someone else's project
and circumvent a presently unknown (to me) development path. Instead, I
am offering to pick up a dropped ball here if the community is
interested. If it is decided that the community would prefer the present
GNU queue system stay as is, I will simply continue my own project as a
completely separate system with a different name.

Your comments are needed to decide what to do here. All feedback is
welcome including anyone who wants to tell me to just nose out and do my
own thing somewhere else.

Cheers,
Koni