Is anyone or a group of people able to maintain appl/bsd better than MIT

[Sam Hartman]

So, it seems that at least one of our assumptions may be wrong and
several people have stepped forward and indicated they would continue
needing rcmd-based applications even if we drop them.

Some people implied they might locally maintain these applications;
Nico pointed out that people could grab the applications out of old
releases.  Both these options frighten me a lot.

MIT has significant experience with producing useful technology, but
not doing a good enough packaging job that others feel the need to
take over the packaging.  All this experience is bad: we tended to get
multiple versions, incompatibility, API/feature set divergence, and
failure to fix bugs in all versions.


It seems that if we do decide to drop appl/bsd, we should treat it
like the other applications and find something to recommend in its
place that is compatible.

Currently MIT is providing critical bug fixing services for these
applications and is doing fairly little else to them.

Are there any individuals or groups of people out there who believe
they could do a better job and would be willing to try?

At this point this is just a question to gather information so that we
can better evaluate our options with regard to on-going discussion.

--Sam