[Savannah-hackers-public] maintainers file format changed

[Karl Berry]

Greetings,

I thought I'd mention to you-all that rms, Jose Marchesi, and I have
developed a new format for the maintainers file -- now it's
author-centric.  The main reason is so we can easily record more
information (phone, address, etc.) about individual maintainers.

Also, we moved the nongnu information (still in the old format) to a
separate file, maintainers.nongnu, since it seemed simpler and better
that way.

There's a TCL script named "gnumaint" that is kept in the GNU Womb CVS
(http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/gnumaint/?root=womb) which can
produce various views of the information, although we didn't bother to
program a view that was exactly the same as the old format.  Obviously
it could be done, if need be.

FYI, this is also part of a longstanding project to create a mechanism
so we can regularly (e.g., yearly) ping all GNU maintainers to make sure
their contact information is still good, they're still active, etc.
That isn't quite ready yet, but it's close.

Let me know if questions or concerns.

Thanks,
Karl