From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from scc-mailout-kit-01-web.scc.kit.edu (scc-mailout-kit-01-web.scc.kit.edu [129.13.231.93]); by fantadrom.bsd.lv (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id 11050ddd; for ; Thu, 8 Jan 2015 06:53:32 -0500 (EST) Received: from asta-nat.asta.uni-karlsruhe.de ([172.22.63.82] helo=hekate.usta.de) by scc-mailout-kit-01.scc.kit.edu with esmtps (TLS1.2:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA256:256) (envelope-from ) id 1Y9Bea-0006PE-GI for discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv; Thu, 08 Jan 2015 12:53:29 +0100 Received: from donnerwolke.usta.de ([172.24.96.3]) by hekate.usta.de with esmtp (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from ) id 1Y9Bea-0003Sr-Am for discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv; Thu, 08 Jan 2015 12:53:28 +0100 Received: from iris.usta.de ([172.24.96.5] helo=usta.de) by donnerwolke.usta.de with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1Y9Bea-0004a7-5l for discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv; Thu, 08 Jan 2015 12:53:28 +0100 Received: from schwarze by usta.de with local (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from ) id 1Y9BeZ-0003g8-R2 for discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv; Thu, 08 Jan 2015 12:53:27 +0100 Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 12:53:27 +0100 From: Ingo Schwarze To: discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv Subject: Re: GNU troff/groff is looking for a maintainer Message-ID: <20150108115327.GB31678@iris.usta.de> References: <20150107232929.GO23950@danbala.tuwien.ac.at> X-Mailinglist: mdocml-discuss Reply-To: discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) 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 -- To unsubscribe send an email to discuss+unsubscribe@mdocml.bsd.lv