Ktorrent Status/Replacement

[Ralph Janke]

On 2014-11-20 09:34, Harald Sitter wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> 
> wrote:
>> On Thursday, November 20, 2014 03:17:33 PM Harald Sitter wrote:
>>> fwiw if only we had a policy to deal with dead upstreams....
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Scott Kitterman 
>>> <ubuntu at kitterman.com>
>> wrote:
>>> > Ktorrent is the current default torrent client that we provide in Kubuntu.
>>> > Now that we've transitioned to Plasma 5, it's no longer
>>> > buildable/installable in "Vivid".
>>> >
>>> > The upstream web site is down: http://ktorrent.org/
>>> 
>>> ^ that wouldn't be the qualifier on whether it suffers from dead 
>>> upstream
>>> 
>>> > I looked in KDE git and there's no sign of a KF5/Plasma 5 port:
>>> > https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/network/ktorrent/repository
>>> 
>>> ^ that wouldn't either
>>> 
>>> > My conclusion is that ktorrent isn't an option for Vivid, so we either
>>> > need to stop shipping a torrent client or pick a different one.
>>> 
>>> ^ those wouldn't be the primary options
>>> 
>>> food for thought
>> 
>> JR fixed it, so it's not an immediate issue.
>> 
>> IMO it wasn't so much a dead upstream issue as a no longer works with 
>> Plasma 5
>> issue.  The dead upstream just made that less likely to get better on 
>> its own.
> 
> my point is that there is no dead upstream, as no one tried to talk to
> upstream (nor brought it to the attention of the large kde developer
> community).

The question is IMHO if you could ever consider an upstream dead. By 
definition
this would mean that it would never become alive again. However, in Open 
Source,
anybody can pick up the source and so a new group of people can take 
over the
maintenance without anybody else being able to prevent it.

So I would rephrase this question. How would you consider that a source 
is
obsolete in the sense that there is a better one the replaces the first 
one
and it does not make sense to put any kind of work in it anymore. Or, if 
it
is still a valid choice, how to create the helpful flow of information 
that
allows people to step forward to keep it maintained.

-- 
txwikinger

Long live free/libre software