[rescue] Alternatives to BIND?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 10:47:58PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On , December 7, 2001 at 14:01:02 (-0800), Gregory Leblanc wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: [rescue] Alternatives to BIND?
> >
> > If there is no traffic on the mailing list, and no replies from the
> > maintainer, it might as well be abandoned.
> 
> I think you may misunderstand how free software and volunteer projects
> work.  Nothing's ever "abandoned" unless the author says so.

Even then it isn't nescesarily abandoned (someone else could have been it up
and been working on it in private).
 
> Yea, and that's _always_ possible, regardless of how high or low
> something is on the author's or current maintainer's priority list; and
> of course assuming you or someone you can influence directly has the
> skill set.  Before the days of Linux and GNU Autoconf almost everyone
> managing any system knew enough about software maintenance to at least
> port something to their systems and hopefuly fix any bugs that got in
> their way too.

On some autoconf projects, it can be hard figuring out enough about the compile
process to find the errors, or fix them.  For instance, I can't snes9x to 
compile, and the most recent few versions won't work either.  I know what the
error is (is wants a .so when all I have is a .a for an XFree library, and I
did use dpkg for setting up XFree), and I kinda no how to fix it (make it
statically link to that lib), but I can't figure out how in the world to 
modify the project to do that.  One of these days I'll get the hang of fixing
autoconf problems, but these days I doubt that most admins would be as 
persistant as me.

Source code bugs I often have a change of being able to fix.
 
> In other words the lack of publicly visible activity in any given
> project is not grounds for ignoring it.

Yeah, after all, maybe the lack of activity is because of how stable it is.
 
> (I've made releases of my software as infrequently as only once every
> 2-4 years or so! :-)



-- 
Joshua D. Boyd