Forking projects

Just a quick one this (apart from trying out the ScribeFire FireFox plugin to see how it does for posting to the blog)… today whilst searching Google for something totally different I found a project on SourceForge called gnujpdf which is a fork of my old retepPDF project.

I’ve not tried it, but it’s good to see someone resurrecting old code (although it does appear to have been dormant for about 2 years now).

This project is a new version of a project called ‘retepPDF’ by Peter
Mount. The project hadn’t been touched in a long time and I wanted to
make some considerable changes to it, so I started a new project and
renamed the package. I haven’t been able to contact Peter yet, but all
credit to him for the hard work of figuring out Adobe’s wacky file
format.

That’s nice – actually Adobe’s format is pretty well engineered, some of the better specification documentation I’ve ever seen so it was easy.

The one thing that got me was this:

This library started out as RetepPDF, by a guy named Peter T. Mount,
whom I have yet to speak with. When researching existing projects to
fill the need for the PDF functionality, I found RetepPdf on
sourceforge and tried to get in touch with Peter, but never had any
luck. The package hadn’t been touched in a while, and I wanted to
improve it, so I opened a new project on sourceforge.

Hmmm, unless it was an obsolete email address (not likely since 2000) it’s probably been a spam filter as I always reply to this sort of thing.

I don’t mind people forking my code, it actually shows to me it’s being used. It’s just nice to know of the forks as I’d probably either help out or see how differently people do things or find bugs etc.

I’m online in various forms, either email (peter at retep dot org dot
uk), jabber (peter at retep dot org), msn (retep207 at hotmail dot com)
the two blogs and various forums dotted around so it’s not like I’m living on a different planet…