[bug-enscript] Status of GNU Enscript as of January 2008

[Tim Retout]

I am aware that I have been keeping rather quiet about enscript
development recently - this is for various reasons:

      * I have been quite busy.
      * I don't want to turn this mailing list into a needlessly
        high-traffic one. After all, it currently has around three
        subscribers.
      * GNU Enscript hasn't had a release for almost five years, so the
        next one can wait a while longer. :)

Still, having played with the source code for a while, I can see far
enough ahead to plan some small goals.

In the long term, Enscript needs a lot of work. There are various GNU
projects that do similar jobs (a2ps, trueprint, source-highlight), and
at some point we will have to decide what to do about that. There are
various large development tasks looming, such as the possibility of
support for unicode input.

I need to do various legal tasks before the next release, such as
checking the copyright assignment status of various highlighting files,
changing the headers of all the files to indicate that the FSF owns the
copyright, and relicensing everything under GPLv3 or later. The next
release will probably contain only bug fixes and these changes.

Before we can even begin on those tasks, there are various maintenance
problems to overcome. The repository is messy - all the files generated
by autoconf have been committed there (because I had to start a new
repository from a tarball release). The layout of the source files does
not help - encoding tables are filling up the root directory.

So I have begun to clean up the autotools files. As of this evening,
`make distcheck' will pass (after invoking `autoreconf -i' and
'./configure'). This should allow incremental changes to be made to the
rest of the build system, while checking nothing breaks along the way.

Please bear with me while we're in this cleanup phase. You can still
send patches to this mailing list - but I'm focusing on maintenance and
bug fixing for the moment.

-- 
Tim Retout <address@hidden>

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