Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

This also seems to be an example of how <i>not</i> to no longer provide support. Close all the issues? Let no one take over? I guess a fork works but I&#x27;ve also seen projects clearly taken over as-is with seemingly &quot;official blessing.&quot; I prefer the latter approach or at the very least, keep the thing untouched until someone steps up. I could be late to the party and someone finally got around to saying &quot;tough shit, we&#x27;re done here&quot; after years of nothing. This just feels cold to me. I don&#x27;t need a sugar coated reason if you&#x27;re honest. You can easily say &quot;all I get are windows support issues. Fuck windows!!!&quot; and it&#x27;d be a thousand times better than what&#x27;s there.

Ruby &gt;= 1.9 also has a built in libffi wrapper, &quot;Fiddle&quot;[1], which can replicate basic Ruby-FFI functionality with some glue code[2]. There aren&#x27;t many examples, but I&#x27;ve successfully used it to call Windows API (GDI+) functions.<p>[1] <a href="http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/fiddle/rdoc/Fiddle.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ruby-doc.org&#x2F;stdlib-2.0.0&#x2F;libdoc&#x2F;fiddle&#x2F;rdoc&#x2F;Fiddle.h...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/tenderlove/hidden-gems-of-ruby-19/134" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;tenderlove&#x2F;hidden-gems-of-ruby-19&#x2F;...</a>

So after reading this commit:<p><a href="https://github.com/ffi/ffi/commit/346c80ad6b8c0e6dc3c390b582a81b306e1ef5f9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ffi&#x2F;ffi&#x2F;commit&#x2F;346c80ad6b8c0e6dc3c390b582...</a><p>and this discussion<p><a href="https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bascule&#x2F;status&#x2F;393509979711213568</a><p>I have the impression that no one can safely fork ruby-ffi without opening himself to legal trouble. It seems like the licensing of the project is a horrible mess.<p>IANAL, so I hope I am reading this wrong?

It could be nice if Rubygems could show which gems that depends on a specific gem. I have a feeling that quite a lot depends on FFI.<p>I know that we depend on FFI, because we use selenium-webdriver, which depends on childprocess, which depends on FFI.

More importantly, FFI 1.9.1 was released today (<a href="http://rubygems.org/gems/ffi" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rubygems.org&#x2F;gems&#x2F;ffi</a>) and completely broke knife-solo, returning a huge stack trace ending with:<p>You may have encountered a bug in the Ruby interpreter or extension libraries.<p>reverting back to FFI 1.9.0 did the trick.

I never understood why aren&#x27;t more Ruby extensions build on FFI instead of the MRI C extensions way - it would make everything work seamlessly on JRuby or Rubinius or Maglev and would also involve much less work.<p>...hope someone of the big Ruby backers take this project under their wing.

Does anyone have a clue of why? I looked, and the only weird thing I can see is the restoring of BSD license text to some files.

This is disappointing. I&#x27;ve created a number of FFI-based projects, and maybe have taken it for granted. I checked the mailing list archives, and did not see any warning signs or calls for new maintainers.

Update: maintenance has been taken over by the JRuby team! Yay!

It&#x27;s unfair that a so widespread project gets killed with so big lack of informations; FFI implementation is essential in every mature development platform IMHO.

OH Great, another Project closed due to stupid and insane License argument and restriction.

Does anyone know the reason for closing this project? Wayne Meissner appears to have just protected his tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/wmeissner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;wmeissner</a>

Here is a link to the &quot;Cleaning up licensing&quot; issue <a href="https://github.com/ffi/ffi/issues/288" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ffi&#x2F;ffi&#x2F;issues&#x2F;288</a>

As was said in the README: &quot;The following people have submitted code, bug reports, or otherwide contributed to the success of this project:&quot;<p>But they can please to go die in a fire.

That&#x27;s definitely unfortunate. Seems like a lot of stuff I&#x27;ve done inadvertently requires ffi. And lately with Ruby 2.0.0-p247 on OS X Mavericks ffi 1.9.1 has been crashing..