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procps 2.0.13 with NPTL enhancements

announce Xose Vazquez Perez 4 participants 5 messages May 29, 2003

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Xose Vazquez Perez

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Quoted 7 lines · Miquel van Smoorenburg
Quoted 6 lines · Robert Love
Quoted 4 lines · Phil Oester

Any comment on the procps v3.1.8 located here:

http://procps.sourceforge.net/

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Seems it is actively maintained...

It is a fork of the original procps tree.

Well, you could also argue that the current 2.0 tree is a retroactive fork of an older version of procps.

I don't understand why you don't work together.

--from the http://procps.sourceforge.net/faq.html -- Why are there so many procps projects?

The original maintainer seems to have had little time for procps. Whatever his reasons, the project didn't get maintained. Starting in 1997, Albert Cahalan wrote a new ps program for the package. For the next few years, Albert quietly helped the Debian package maintainer fix bugs. In 2001, Rik van Riel decided to do something about what appeared to be the lack of a maintainer. He picked up the buggy old code in Red Hat's CVS and started adding patches. Meanwhile, other people have patched procps in a great many ways. In 2002, Albert moved procps to this site. This was done to ensure that years of testing and bug fixes would not be lost. The major version number was changed to 3, partly to avoid confusing users and partly because the top program has been redone. --end--

I think too that is to waste the time&resources to have two, and to do a little different some LiNUX distributions in a basic and important package

but if both have freetime... ;-)

regards,

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Quoted 18 lines · Xose Vazquez Perez

--from the http://procps.sourceforge.net/faq.html -- Why are there so many procps projects?

The original maintainer seems to have had little time for procps. Whatever his reasons, the project didn't get maintained. Starting in 1997, Albert Cahalan wrote a new ps program for the package. For the next few years, Albert quietly helped the Debian package maintainer fix bugs. In 2001, Rik van Riel decided to do something about what appeared to be the lack of a maintainer. He picked up the buggy old code in Red Hat's CVS and started adding patches. Meanwhile, other people have patched procps in a great many ways. In 2002, Albert moved procps to this site. This was done to ensure that years of testing and bug fixes would not be lost. The major version number was changed to 3, partly to avoid confusing users and partly because the top program has been redone. --end--

Quoted 5 lines

I think too that is to waste the time&resources to have two, and to do a little different some LiNUX distributions in a basic and important package

but if both have freetime... ;-)

Well, since I read Albert Cahalan's comment in Debian bug #172735 [1] I understand the people maintaining a different branch...

Quoted 1 line

regards,

cu
Adrian

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/172735

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Quoted 2 lines · Adrian Bunk

Well, since I read Albert Cahalan's comment in Debian bug #172735 [1] I understand the people maintaining a different branch...

Exactly.

That bug is fixed in the official tree, fyi. A segfault, as you said, is always a bug. An error message is displayed.

Once that bug is fixed, he will probably find that the inability to read files in /proc also causes a crash. Such is the problem with this duplicated effort. It sucks. I told Albert I would be happy to merge each and every (sane) change he sends me. He refuses. To be fair, I also refuse to work under his tree. His comments on this list is part of the reason. For what its worth, he did not fork off and create his tree until Rik starting work on the official tree.

In the end, all that matters to me really is that Red Hat and other big distributions use my tree (apparently whether I maintain it or not) and I use those distributions. If I used Debian, maybe my view would be different. Or maybe I would make them switch trees :)

Robert Love