[gnome-love] GNOME Utilities :: Needs a maintainer

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Heya,

For the past few years I've been casually maintaining the gnome-utils
package on and off, although making very few code changes. A long time
ago, the gnome-utils package was full of all sorts of weird and wacky
utilities, that no one really used. Much of the code was unmaintained
and started to bit rot. Since then, we have managed to reduce the module
down to the following utilities -

        Dictionary
                - Uses a dict protocol to connect n online dictionary 
                  server, which proves to be not so useful for 
                  non-native English speakers. The code is decent
                  enough, but could do with a rewrite, or some clever
                  way to integrate better into the desktop - should a
                  beagle [1] search look up dictionary? Could it be
                  part of the help browser? ...

        Floppy Formatter
                - I've never used this, but Stef Dermurget has done 
                  quite a bit of work improving the code. This one's
                  in good shape

        Search Tool
                - Dennis Cranston has done an excellent job maintaining
                  this in the past, and there's not much more that is 
                  needed. The code is good, and the app looks and feels
                  great

        Log Viewer
                - This one is a bit dud, and starting to code rot. I've
                  thought about rewriting this time and time again, but
                  never really got around to it. Should it even belong
                  in a gnome-utils package, especially since it seems 
                  to be more oriented towards system administrators?

Anyway, that's discussion to be had on another day. I don't have the
time or motivation to continue maintaining gnome-utils, and I really
feel that it's unfair for me to continue doing nothing [2] on the
module, code wise, when there are 1000's of potential contributors who
could give the module some life. 

I've decided to give up maintenance and won't be doing any more releases
in the future. If you're interested, and have some time to spare, drop
me an email if you would like to maintain gnome-utils.

thanks,

Glynn


[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle
[2] Outside of rolling releases for the GNOME schedule