[Bins] future of bins

[James G. Sack (jim)]

I have recently discovered bins (via freshmeat) in my hunt for a static
photo album toolset that suits me.

I find a lot in bins that I like, and would like to try building some
albums around it, but run into some ugly problems with perl dependencies
 (on Fedora 7). I'm fairly knowledgable about cpan and building
packages, but it's still troublesome. Perhaps I should just work on a
ubuntu system for access to the deb's linked at
  http://bins.sautret.org/install_prerequisites.html

..BUT..

But in looking at the list archives, I am somewhat troubled by the
posting of
  https://www.email-lists.org/pipermail/bins/2007-February/000345.html

containing these remarks:

"""
On another note, Jerome hasn't responded on the mailing list for quite some
time. His last commit to the CVS repo was more than a year ago. I hope this
doesn't mean that the project has been abandoned? How will we get this
change into the next release (if indeed this is the correct fix)?
"""

I haven't studied the code, but it looks like _much_ better than average
perl code, and likely to be maintainable by other than the original
author. Possibly the memory-leak patch is evidence of that?

I'm wondering:
-1- does the list membership continue to use and like bins?
-2- does anyone know what happened to Jérôme?
-3- do enough programmers feel it is understandable & maintainable
-4- does anyone have experience with arch (evidently) SCM format at
   http://arch.gna.org/bins/public/
-5- does anyone have a CVS (or other) mirror?
-6- might anybody be interested in a rewrite in python
   (I'm thinking the dependencies _might_ be less troublesome,
    and ongoing maintenance might be easier in python than perl)

Regards,
..jim