Re: [screen-devel] screen maintainer?

[Micah Cowan]

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Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Juergen, Micha, Micah, and all,
> 
> Glad to see such a rapid and prolific response!
> 
> Let's see.  First, one easy answer is yes, there is a ceremony for
> appointing new maintainers, at which rms officiates :).  Developers who
> do not already maintain another GNU package need to look at the coding
> standards, etc.  I try to shepherd people through that process.
> 
> For screen, it seems we now have a plethora of experienced and
> knowlegeable "developers" but no one with time to be the "maintainer",
> unfortunately.  And yes, there should be a maintainer -- the person who
> pushes through new releases and in general is ultimately responsible for
> taking care of the project.  For reference:
> http://gnu.org/help/evaluation.html#whatmeans
> http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Recruiting-Developers.html
> 
> Assuming that no one here can commit to that, yes, we should look for a
> new maintainer -- notices on the screen web page and savannah project
> pages are good, GNU home page, etc.  I can do that if that's the way we
> want to go.

Actually, those are the sorts of things I _can_ commit to. Managing and
organizing bugs, pushing through and handling administration of
releases, helping with support, etc, ... what I _can't_ commit to is
heavy development stuff. IME, that generally takes a lot more
preparation, research, and legwork, etc, etc. I can research what ought
to be done, but doing it would usually be left to someone else, except
for the small stuff.

That is, I could help to direct Screen as a product; but without other
willing developers to guide, that skill would wind up being somewhat
useless... :) I could do small bugfixes, but major features or
significant design revisions, I'd probably be unable to handle (because,
I'm already focusing on just these sorts of things with Wget: our major
administrative hurdles, such as implmenting bugfixes, migrating to
GPLv3+, instantiating a wiki, etc., have already been done ;) ).

> Screen is such a popular and long-standing program, it's especially
> important to have it be actively maintained.  The last release I see on
> ftp.gnu.org is from 2004 :(.
> 
> One immediate issue is that, as a GNU package, the license should be
> upgraded to "GPLv3 or later".  If you don't want to make a new release
> with technical changes now (which would be ideal), then could one of you
> prepare a release simply changing all the 2's to 3's in the license
> notices and changing the COPYING file to the new text?

I'd be happy to take charge of that effort, after discussion with the
others of course.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer,
and GNU Wget Project Maintainer.
http://micah.cowan.name/
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