biweekly Critical issues plea

[Graham Percival]

Did you know that English is an absolutely stupid language?  The
word "biweekly" can mean either "4 times each 14 days", or "1 time
each 14 days"!

Anyway, here's my less-than-twice-a-week plea to new contributors:

We are, yet again, about 10-20 hours of work away from having 0
critical issues.  This is a familiar position; we've been like
this since mid-August.  There is no change of releasing 2.14 in
Jan, and only a small chance of having it in Feb.  As we slowly
fix Critical issues, people discover more.  

We simply have an imbalance between the energy/interest of
developers and the amount of Critical issues.  That's where the
new contributors come in.  Any effort you put towards fixing
Critical issues will help fix them sooner, which in turn will make
2.14 happen sooner.

Work on Critical issues has pretty much wound down.  Carl asked
about the status of 1474 recently; I'd like to take that a step
further and ask for a dedicated volunteer to act as "shepherd" for
each issue.
- you *don't* need to program, or even understand programming
  (but that would be a plus)
- you *do* need to read all emails on the subject
- you *do* need to keep the issue up-to-date.  If there's a large
  discussion happening, just follow it, but when the discussion
  dies down, make sure that you post a summary and/or links to
  the main emails in the issue.
- you should be ready to give a status update if somebody asks for
  one, but that shouldn't be necessary because you should have
  already updated the issue with that info.

There's three Critical issues: 1472, 1474, and 1475.  Any takers?
(again, to be the "shepherd" or "secretary", not to handle all
programming tasks yourself)


The release is never going to happen if nobody works on it.  New
contributors, please consider working on it.  All it takes is time
and energy.

Cheers,
- Graham