Re: new Emacs maintainer(s)?

[David Kastrup]

address@hidden (Kim F. Storm) writes:

> Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> However, if no one else wants to maintainer, I would not mind doing
>> it; I think I shall have enough spare time to devote to this, at least
>> during the next three or four years.
>
> Is that for 22.x only, or 23.1 ?
>
> In any case, you have my full support!

I am not sure whether it is a good idea to discuss this sort of
personals question on the list: after all, the decision rests with
Richard, so we don't want to get hopes up only to have disappointment
afterwards.

On the other hand, of course I can't resist mouthing off about
something like that, either...

Here would be my scheme for an ideal setup:

22.x principal maintainer: Chong.  Reason: we want to invest minimal
man- and mindpower into 22.x and rather move forward.  Chong has a
history with 22.x across the board for and with pulling through with
technical decisions (even though he did not make most of them on his
own) even on code with which he has not had a long acquaintance.  He
keeps reasonably on top of things, so he is a pretty good candidate
for merging appropriate fixes from the trunk.  If 22.x were in the
hands of Chong, I would have little qualms about moving the trunk to
emacs-unicode2 pretty much right away (well, I wouldn't, anyway, but
in this case I would be rather confident about the consequences).  The
downside would be mostly for Chong himself: it is to be expected that
people indeed will leave 22.x mostly in his hands.  However, if the
decisions to make are mostly in his hands, too, it is likely that
he'll be able to work more efficiently than when he is "on a leash".
And if he can dispense with the 22.x work efficiently and in his own
manner, it might not even take the bulk of his energy and time.

23.x principal maintainer: more difficult.  We want to have a
maintainer that makes working on Emacs fun while still keeping the
"party line" of the GNU Project.  Maybe splitting this into a
technical lead and a policy supervisor would make sense.  Could be an
option to leave the latter somewhat ungrateful job to Richard.  For
the technical lead, at least for part of the way, we want someone who
has familiarity with emacs-unicode-2 though it need not be his primary
focus.  We also want to get to the release at some point of time.  I
guess that my personal favorite here would actually be Kim, mostly
because he has pretty much managed to keep out of the release spats in
spite of his experience and seems well enough in contact with much
code, including the display engine.  Which could help for gathering
the impetus for Emacs 24 (the one with bidirectional language support
for which there is considerable demand by users that are pretty much
out in the cold for now).

Now of course this kind of setup will depend on the people actually
being willing and able to step up to that kind of responsibility.

Of course, there is a list of candidates who certainly would have
enough authority and competence to pull through with the requirements.
That was just my first thought on the "wouldn't it be nice if" scale.

-- 
David Kastrup