Re: [screen-devel] screen maintainer?

[Karl Berry]

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.

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?

How does all that sound?

Thanks again,
Karl