The project is pretty dormant as far as I know. I haven't done anything on it myself for ages.
H. G. Muller has been by far the main coder on the project for many years. He has his own web page at
http://hgm.nubati.net/. I don't know if the version on Savannah is up to date with all his work, and I don't know what he's been doing on it lately. (HG, are you tuned in?)
I'm not sure what happened to your request, Dave. Your name is familiar, and looking back in my email I see we've interacted as far back as 2003. I'd be glad to approve you as a project member on savannah -- for what that's worth! I don't seem to have gotten any email about it or any kind of notification on Savannah. I don't remember how the process of adding someone to the group goes, and amazingly I can't find it in the savannah documentation either.
What I think the project needs most at the moment is someone to look into the current state of the code, find out whether Savannah is up to date with HG's work, do some testing, and make a numbered release version for distros and such to pick up. Of course other contributions would be good too, but probably they'll see few if any users if we don't roll out a release.
As it happens, I started playing chess again a couple of years ago after hardly playing for about 20 years. I've been playing on
lichess.org, which has a way better browser-based UI and features than xboard/WinBoard ever did. So although I thought I might get back into using xboard, I never did.
Best regards!
Tim