Not a bug, but a note for users and contributors*

[the-moog]

*Started as note for myself but I think I should share this with others and I am rubbish at filing....

On searching for some info on where libfuse/sshfs is going, I found a few forks of sshfs that are not well promoted.
All have some fixes and commits or deviations, a couple are attempts at a do-over.
I've no idea how more or less stable they are but may find the time to look at them.

I thought it worth sharing the info in case anybody gets an urge to pick up the project formally.

My stock Debian 12 is using 3.7.3, so ancient and I think suffering bitrot. I can see it was based on this repo.
I think all of these are newer so a simple merge of a handful of the safest changes may improve the situation.

A couple have misdirected bug reports that should get collated, as does the mailing list mentioned in the README.md

• deadbeefsociety - commits: +53/-13( last in Oct '23)
  The above also has a 3.7.4a release binary from late 2023, but perhaps a fresh build is safer.
• andy0130tw - commits: +6/-13(last in 2022)(OE?)
• Hintro - commits: +12/-5(last in 2023)
• neunenak - commits: +167/-14(last in 2022)(Rust port)
• chro4896 - commits: +468/-5(last in Oct '24 - active!!)(Rust port)

[h4sh5]

Hi @the-moog , thanks for your effort of collating all of that!

So, the deadbeefsociety fork (the top entry) was my effort to re-open a sshfs repo for maintenance. I've since become a contributor to this main repo so that it's no longer archived. I should in fact archive the deadbeefsociety fork since it's no longer needed. As for 3.7.4a - there was only one real feature change (adding a very niche flag that very few people will ever use) and it was a revert from 3.7.4 which was a disaster leading to a major bug.

This repo is the most stable version of SSHFS, and it doesn't look like chro4896's rust fork is complete yet, and the changes there are certainly not mergeable with this repo. Hopefully that fork succeeds and gets to a good release.

3.7.3 is not ancient, and bitrot is not a thing caused by unmaintained repos. Software that works works forever - it's the ground shifting underneathe them that causes "bitrot". Please read this https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

[h4sh5]

There has only been a few very minor bug fixes since 3.7.3, which is why a new release has not been made yet. When it is released, it will probably be 3.7.5 to not confuse some downstream repos that have taken 3.7.4a from the deadbeef fork (such as OpenSUSE, I think they're the only ones)