After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep the package up to date.
On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink, and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About 10 days ago, I made a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new upstream project at Savannah, and continue development there. The project is registered and currently waiting for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue working on the future release.
It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.