current maintenance situation and possible solutions

[mfranz]

It looks like the OIS maintainer doesn't have much time to work on the project since a while -- patches and "issues" are starting to pile up in the development forum and the bug tracker. My RFC ("Request For Comments") from May 30 about an annoying usability bug is still unanswered after seven weeks. For a project that depends on OIS and has its own release schedule this is a rather unfortunate situation, and we have to consider possible solutions. One of them is to fork the project and to maintain it for our own purpose, as part of our project or even publicly, as a replacement for official OIS. In the latter case we'd invite people to switch to the fork, but in any case this would be a friendly fork -- one that encourages mutual merges. Of course, we would respect the license and all its obligations. Newly added code would for legal reasons carry our (added) copyright, though.

Maintaining our own fork, however, isn't all fun either, so we'd like to avoid it if possible. What is "official OIS'" opinion on that? What do OIS users think?

[pjcast]

Hard to say that nothing has happened in a while?! I just committed xinput support last weekend. Moved to SVN a few weeks before that, while applying a few patches. Sure, some patches sit around longer than others, but you are talking like nothing is happening. Anyone is free to apply patches to their local copies... in fact I encourage that, than I can get some feedback before I spend the time committing and testing myself.

If you would like to become a direct svn contributer feel free to inquire on that. You are also free to start a fork if you so desire, the code is pretty free of course.

As far as the patch tracker sf site go, please post on the forum as I do not have time to always be checking that site as well. I will take a look at your forum patches this weekend.

[kornerr]

I think it all boils down to "when will we see a new release". 2 years must have changed OIS in some way.

[pjcast]

I usually recommend people use the latest dev branch. There have been improvements made of course.

[mfranz]

(...)but you are talking like nothing is happening.

Yeah, that was a bit of an exaggeration. My impression came mainly from the 7 weeks of non-reaction to my RFC. Actually, it's still unanswered, so make that 8 weeks. :-) I wouldn't expect an earlier answer to a posting of the "ois doesn't work -- please fix it"-kind, but this was a rather detailed problem description with a patch that fixes the problem. Nobody objected, tdev agreed with it. Makes a 2:0 victory.  ;-)

Anyone is free to apply patches to their local copies...

That's what I was doing already, along with spreading my patches. But that is already a kind of fork! And the logical next step would have been to make that fork official. But it's great to hear that it won't be necessary. Thanks for applying my two patches! Could you, please, look into the RFC-message as well? I admit that its title was badly worded. I should have labeled that BUG, too. Setting XAutoRepeatOff for all of X11, just because one app feels like it, is a bug on a multitasking/multidesktop system. I'd consider that X11 function obsolete. It's bad, bad, bad.

I will take a look at your forum patches this weekend.

Thanks! :-)

[pjcast]

Will take a look at that. Plan to do a release next week as well.

[Jubei]

Hello. Newcomer to the forum, great work on OIS, keep it up!

I would just like to add that even though the SourceForge.net page is the official home of OIS, a link to the forums from http://www.wreckedgames.com/ would be useful. A wiki too maybe.

Perhaps the admin could recruit some people from the forums to help with the workload. I think a better, more organized web presence would help stir interest towards the project and get more developers to contribute. Then we might see some more ports etc.