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New maintainer wanted

Item posted by Jean Delvare <khali> on Fri 12 Jun 2009 12:27:32 PM UTC.

I have been maintaining dmidecode for over 6 years now. Officially, since April 2003. In practice, even earlier than that. I first established a home for the project on Savannah, with version 1.8 being released in January 2003. Then I reorganized the code significantly, leading to the code base as we know it today (including the split of non-DMI data reporting to biosdecode), which was released as dmidecode 2.0 in March 2003.

In the following years, changes have been smaller. I essentially worked on support of new versions of the SMBIOS specification and on portability. The result is pretty good, with dmidecode now running on 3 architectures (i386, x86-64 and ia64), 4 operating system families (Linux, BSD, BeOS and Solaris) plus Cygwin, and being now incorporated into most popular Linux and BSD distributions.

Then the next big change was the command line interface, introduced in version 2.7 and improved since. This made dmidecode a valuable tool for applications to rely on.

Now the time has come for me to pass over the maintenance work to someone else. I no longer have the time to do it myself, and admittedly after that long, motivation has also dropped significantly.

So, this is a call for a new maintainer for the dmidecode project. If you are interested, please reply. You'll need to create yourself an account on Savannah, so that I can add you as a member of the project. I will make sure we have a reasonable transition period, and I plan to keep lurking on the dmidecode-devel mailing list for some more time.

Dmidecode is written in C, with a very simple Makefile, and manual pages. The code is reasonably clean by now, and pretty small and simple too, with a total of 5840 lines of code (counting comments). So it really shouldn't be difficult for anyone with average C skills to get into it. If you are looking for a small project to contribute to, this may be a good opportunity, please think about it!