SysV init project is moving to a new home

[Adam Borowski]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2022 at 11:19:53PM +0100, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> I think you’ll better just publish textual writeups in a
> form that work, either as website or inline in mails.

Lemme use the worship method of the Missionary Church of Kopimism:

=======================================================================
Feb 8, 2022 at 9:39 PM
SysV init gets a new home

About four years ago I had the pleasure of joining the SysV init project. 
This team was responsible for maintaining the sysvinit, insserv, and
startpar projects.  These three pieces of software handled system
initialization, working out dependencies between init scripts (like those
used by Devuan), and starting scripts in parallel.

One of the reasons I first joined the SysV init project was there hadn't
been any new releases for around five years and it seemed the project had
stopped collaborating with downstream Linux distributions.  It was my plan
to upstream patches, fix some bugs, and bring the documentation up to
date.

I feel like the work has gone well and I'm happy with the contributions
I've been able to get included.  With the help of other contributors and
downstream package maintainers we've made some significant improvements to
the state of the SysV init ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the rest of the SysV init team never
resumed work.  I was left to contribute more or less on my own after my
first fresh release.  SysV init was hosted on the Savannah infrastructure
(backed by GNU) and I was listed as a Contributor while other team members
were Admins.  Most of the time there wasn't a significant difference, but
it meant I couldn't update the SysV init website, add new contributors, or
remove old files which were no longer used (like stale symbolic links).

I tried reaching out to the project's Admins and, when I didn't hear back
from them, I contacted the Savannah administrators and support team
through multiple channels.  This was back in 2019.  This week (in Feb
2022) I finally heard back from a Savannah project member, but it doesn't
look like I'm going to be granted Admin status, even though I've been the
only SysV maintainer for the past three years.

What was only a small issue of access a few years ago has grown.  I've
heard from a few more people who want to contribute to SysV init and would
like to help.  There is code to clean-up and translations being worked on. 
Me not being able to give people direct access to make pull requests,
clean-up old files, or give them contributor status is increasingly
becoming a roadblock to further development.

Since I haven't been able to make progress with the Savannah caretakers
I've decided to move the SysV init family (sysvinit, insserv, and
startpar) to GitHub.  The new project URLs are listed below.  With the new
home will come the ability to more easily share work, invite new coders to
contribute, and side-step some of the quirks which slowed down the release
process when we were using Savannah.  GitHub also has a much larger
community and some people were put off at the idea of needing a separate
Savannah account just to send bug reports.  Hopefully this move will lower
the bar for future development.

If you're a coder, documentation writer, tester, or someone who wants to
report issues, please come check us out at our new home!


sysvint project: - https://github.com/slicer69/sysvinit

insserv project - https://github.com/slicer69/insserv

startpar project - https://github.com/slicer69/startpar

======================================================================

>   "Using Lynx is like wearing a really good pair of shades: cuts out
>    the glare and harmful UV (ultra-vanity), and you feel so-o-o COOL."

... but using eLinks is more cool :)

Meow!
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