Taking over Qcontrol upstream
When I took over the qcontrol package in Debian, back in October 2012, I was aware that upstream hadn't been active for quite a while (since late 2009). I figured that would be OK since the software was pretty simple and pretty much feature complete.
Nevertheless since I've been maintaining the package I've had a small number of wishlist bugs (many with patches, thanks guys!) which are really upstream issues. While I could carry them as patches in the Debian package they would really be better taken care of by an upstream.
With that in mind I mailed the previous upstream (and original author) Byron Bradley back in February to ask if he would mind if I took over as upstream. Unfortunately I haven't yet heard back, given how long upstream has been inactive for this isn't terribly surprising so having waited several months I have decided to just go ahead and take over upstream development. Thanks Byron for all your work on the project, I hope you don't mind me taking over.
Since it is unlikely that I will be able to access the old website or Subversion repository I have converted the repository to git and uploaded it to gitorious:
I don't expect I'll be doing an awful lot of proactive upstream development but at least now I have a hat I can put on when someone reports an "upstream" issue against qcontrol and somewhere which can accept upstream patches from myself and others.
I'm still deciding what to do about a website etc. I may just enable the gitorious wiki or I may setup an ikiwiki software site type setup, which has the advantage of being a little more flexible and providing a neat way of dealing with bug reports without being too much overhead to setup up.
In the meantime its been almost 5 years since the last release, so...
New Release: qcontrol 0.5.0
This is a rollup of some changes which were made in the old upstream SVN repository but never released and some patches which had been made in the Debian packaging. What's here corresponds to the Debian 0.4.2+svn-r40-3 package.
The 0.4.2 release was untagged in SVN, but corresponds to r14, new stuff since then includes:
- Support for more hardware (TS-119, TS-219, TS-41x, all by Martin Michlmayr)
- Support auto power on feature (by Martin Michlmayr)
- Support for the A125 LCD on TS-419P devices (by Bernhard R. Link)
- Support for a daemon mode, including syslog (Byron Bradley)
- Support for disabling the watchdog on TS-219P II and TS-419P II (Helmut Pozimski)
- Various other fixes (Loïc Minier, Martin, Bernhard, Byron)
As well as the change of maintainer I think the addition of the daemon mode warrants the bump to 0.5.0.
Get the new release from git or http://www.hellion.org.uk/qcontrol/releases/0.5.0/.
I've just released qcontrol 0.5.1. Changes since the last release:
- Add build targets to enable static linking (Original patch by Frans Pop).
- Wake-on-Lan and EUP control (by Michael Stapelberg, Debian bug #703888).
- Updated example configurations (based on Debian package).
- Support loading configuration snippets from a directory (Ian Campbell, Debian bug #697574).
- Various other bug fixes.
I also put together a very basic homepage.
Get it from gitorious or http://www.hellion.org.uk/qcontrol/releases/0.5.1/.
The Debian package will be uploaded shortly.