Hi,
- too many vdr-related projects dying or being orphaned when the original author looses interest
In most cases, its probably not just loosing interest, but running out of time. Handling a job, a family and a time-consuming hobby all at once is nearly impossible...
Yes, but what should happen to those projects?
The lcdproc plugin has been orphaned by its original author, but another author has published several patched and greatly improved versions. Yet he doesn't consider himself the new maintainer. So is it abandoned?
The analogtv plugin is abandoned, yet it's part of some vdr distributions. Their packagers keep patching it so that it works with vdr 1.6.x. Should it be dropped?
- too many different locations to find sources and patches
For short term patches, if a new VDR version breaks something, forums are a good source for patches.
Counterexample: PDAExport is a project that the developer distributes on the German vdr-portal.de forum. There is no homepage and contact address - the readme contains his forum nickname.
For more long term patches, the wikis are a good place to look, and they're easy to maintain by everyone. So if you find some useful patch, don't hesitate to add a link to the wiki.
Which Wiki? There are several, and the German vdr-wiki.de seems to be more up to date than the English linuxtv.org/vdrwiki
http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/Plugins http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Plugins
So far, there seem to be too many locations to send patches to.
Regards,
Hanno