Re: RFS: splay -- Sound player for MPEG-1,2 layer 1,2,3

[John Hedges <john@drystone.co.uk>]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 03:23:49PM +0200, Erik Schanze wrote:
> John Hedges <john@drystone.co.uk> John Hedges:
> > I'd like to adopt splay, a command line mp3 player. I've updated the
> > bug
> > report (#246971) to reflect ITA but have a couple of questions
> > before
> > uploading.
> >
> >  - I'm not sure about the upstream. I've mailed the current upstream
> >    maintainer but have not had a reply. How much of a problem is it
> >    if
> >    there is no longer an upstream for this package?
> >
> What's the problem of many orphaned packages, so the suggestion of e.
> g. New 
> Maintainer Guide to start the DD career with an orphaned package is
> sometimes 
> suboptimal. Because if there is no active upstream you have to do
> needed work 
> (bugfixing, improving) by yourself.
> 
> If you are able to do this by yourself, this package suits. If you are
> not a 
> programmer, a package with an active upstream to delegate work on
> source code  
> would be better.

I have done a fair bit of programming and I am not too phased by the
code despite being an mpeg codec newbie. My main concern is what to do
to implement additional functionality. Could I continue to call the
package splay if the functionality differs considerably from the
upstream - or must I create a new project (and upstream) based on splay
before adding features?

Cheers

John