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* GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer
@ 2015-01-07 23:29 Thomas Klausner
  2015-01-08 10:40 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  2015-01-08 10:45 ` Paul Thomas Melville
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Thomas Klausner @ 2015-01-07 23:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: discuss

Hi!

I just saw, on the groff homepage:

"GNU troff is looking for a maintainer. If you’re interested, please
take a look at this general information about GNU packages and being a
GNU maintainer, and then email maintainers@gnu.org with a bit about
your background and particular interest in this package. Thanks. "

http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff.html

 Thomas
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* Re: GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer
  2015-01-07 23:29 GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer Thomas Klausner
@ 2015-01-08 10:40 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  2015-01-08 10:45 ` Paul Thomas Melville
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Steffen Nurpmeso @ 2015-01-08 10:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: discuss

Thomas Klausner <wiz@NetBSD.org> wrote:
 |I just saw, on the groff homepage:
 |
 |"GNU troff is looking for a maintainer. If youb

I don't understand this joke, shall it be meant as one.  troff is
a program with history and still of use.  I use it to typeset my
letters, for example.  I'm absolutely sure there will never appear
any animated advertisments when it does that.  And i hope i will
get my S-roff going, which is a clone of GNU troff starting at the
last GPL2 commit, and extend it over the years.  I'm stuck with
creating mdocmx(7) since November, a reference extension of
mdoc(7) that is really great to use, but adds even more delays.
Regarding GNU troff: i personally will not sign that GNU
petitition.  And as far as i know that is what prevents Ingo from
putting more effort into GNU troff, too.  Carsten Kunze has forked
Heirloom troff and has worked quite a bit on it, too.
It would be a pity if NetBSD would remove a working troff from
their codebase.

--steffen
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* Re: GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer
  2015-01-07 23:29 GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer Thomas Klausner
  2015-01-08 10:40 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
@ 2015-01-08 10:45 ` Paul Thomas Melville
  2015-01-08 11:53   ` Ingo Schwarze
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 4+ messages in thread
From: Paul Thomas Melville @ 2015-01-08 10:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: discuss

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 12:29 AM, Thomas Klausner wrote:

> I just saw, on the groff homepage:
>
> "GNU troff is looking for a maintainer. If youb
> take a look at this general information about GNU packages and being a
> GNU maintainer, and then email maintainers@gnu.org with a bit about
> your background and particular interest in this package. Thanks. "


This message is hanging there for a long time - according to
archive.org since December 2013.
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* Re: GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer
  2015-01-08 10:45 ` Paul Thomas Melville
@ 2015-01-08 11:53   ` Ingo Schwarze
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Ingo Schwarze @ 2015-01-08 11:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: discuss

Hi,

Paul Onyschuk wrote on Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 11:45:34AM +0100:
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 12:29 AM, Thomas Klausner wrote:

>> I just saw, on the groff homepage:
>>
>> "GNU troff is looking for a maintainer. If youb
>> take a look at this general information about GNU packages and being a
>> GNU maintainer, and then email maintainers@gnu.org with a bit about
>> your background and particular interest in this package. Thanks. "

> This message is hanging there for a long time - according to
> archive.org since December 2013.

And they are not going to find a maintainer any time soon,
more's the pity.

Obviously, a maintainer must be an active contributor first.
They do not have more than three or four active contributors
right now, none of them very active, all with a very narrow
working area (one for the mom macros, one for PDF device
drivers, one screwing around in a low-quality way with Perl
support scripts).  In addition to that, there are less than
a dozen inactive committers.  That's all.

So, what they are actually searching for is any kind of any active
contributor, and even that appears hard to come by, deplorably.

One guy popped up out of the blue, said "I want to be the
maintainer" and flung around some management jargon.  He doesn't
know anything, not even his own utter incompetence.  He never
contributed a line of code and is unable to even handle the
simplest and most obvious patches provided by others.
Everybody is too polite to just tell him how pathetic he is.
He is now listed as a project admin.


Steffen's remark about my relation to the GNU troff project is
slightly misleading.  It is true that whenever i find a problem in
GNU troff that annoys me enough, i fix it, commit the patch to the
OpenBSD ports tree, and send it upstream.  So far, all my patches
were either committed or rejected for sound technical reasons,
except a very small number of not very important ones that are
pending because nobody found time yet to evaluate them.

It is also true that i won't sign a GNU Copyright assignment
contract, and that the FSF lawyers and the FSF board are now
pondering for about a year whether and how to allow Copyright-
worthy contributions into core GNU projects without requiring
such an assignment because they now understand that requiring
people to sign this contract deters contributors.

So whenever i will develop substantial patches to groff, that
Copyright assignment is likely to block the road.  But right
now, it is not blocking anything.  I'm not writing suffiently
large patches, anyway, because none of groff's issues hurts me
enough to spend the time.

Yours,
  Ingo
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end of thread, other threads:[~2015-01-08 11:53 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2015-01-07 23:29 GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer Thomas Klausner
2015-01-08 10:40 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2015-01-08 10:45 ` Paul Thomas Melville
2015-01-08 11:53   ` Ingo Schwarze

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