This implies that if you change jobs or ISP's, you have to re-release
new versions of all the software you have ever released as a primary
author or maintainer. This can be onerous if you've written a lot of
small packages. Imagine pushing out a megabyte of new .tar.gz files
with a changelog entry like:
foo 1.4.2: Exactly the same as foo 1.4.1, except that in the
source code comments and README file the address is now
'zblaxell@furryterror.org' instead of 'zblaxell@myrus.com'.
Except for timestamps, the binary images are byte-for-byte
identical.
Users don't want that upgrade. Archive maintainers would probably like
to avoid using up bandwidth for it, especially those that are the targets
of thousands of mirror programs that will download the entire file just
because it has a different name.
If you're actually making changes to the code, then you can include a
change of address anyway, and the incremental cost of that change
is trivial and more than compensated by the benefits of whatever it is
you are extending or fixing other than your email address. But if your
code has been quiet for a year or two, issuing a trivial update isn't
all so trivial.
In the specific case of tunelp I don't really understand why it, and
several utilities like it, like kbd, modutils, setserial, etc. don't
get maintained along with the kernel device driver. tunelp is a trivial
command-line program that doesn't do _anything_ other than configure a
Linux-specific device driver with some ioctl()s. If it did as much as
a scan for external devices on the parallel port I would agree that it
may be complex or non-Linux-kernel-specific enough to need to be
maintained outside of the kernel sources, but that's not the case...
-- Zygo Blaxell, Linux Engineer, Corel Corporation. zygob@corel.ca (work) or zblaxell@furryterror.org (play). Corel may disagree with my opinion (above). Size of 'diff -Nurw [...] winehq corel' as of Tue May 11 15:14:00 EDT 1999 Lines/files: In 54144 / 292, Out 16700 / 154, Both 48717 / 329- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/