According to his blog, Capistrano's primary author stopped maintaining it in 2009. The old web site capify.org now redirects to documentation on Github, and while it seems through the CHANGELOG that there are still contributions being accepted, is it fair to classify Capistrano as an active project?
Conversely, if it works well and is still stable, are there are any reasons to abandon it?
Capistrano is mature and is not in need of much work. It still has a huge user base with >24K downloads for the 21 Mar 2011 release.
Jamis Buck created Capistrano somewhere around 2005. He did the majority of work on it until Feb 2009 when he announced he would be handing over maintainership of it.
Lee Hambley took over and has been maintaining the project since then.
Documentation is now on github wiki. The google group is still active.
Yes, looking at github, last commit was 10 days ago. There is also a good variety of different committers too.
Pogo might be a good alternative to Capistrano. I can confirm that Pogo us under very active development right now. I currently use it to do software pushes to many thousands of machines.
The only caveat is that the open source Pogo is still quite rough around the edges and somewhat cumbersome to set up.
