Re: Octave Forge -- Looking for a new leader

[Olaf Till]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 10:09:38PM +0000, Carnë Draug wrote:
> Hi everyone
> 
> For quite some time I have been the primary maintainer of the
> Octave-Forge project but for the last year or so I have not been
> able to do what is required for such a position.
> 
> I have been feeling it creep for a while so six months ago I suggested
> to have some sort of election like Debian does [1].  When no one
> said anything, I realized it was a terrible idea.  Still, we need a
> new maintainer for the project. The current situation is not good
> for me and is not good for the project either.
> 
> Is anybody interested in taking the lead? If you are not comfortable
> naming yourself, then feel free to contact me offline.
> 
> Thanks
> Carnë
> 
> [1] 
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/octave-maintainers/2016-04/msg00054.html

Carnë,

this is bad news. And I'm sure we are all grateful for your work, even
those who rather emotionally discuss details of strategy. But it is
understandable that one person doesn't want to do all that work
forever. The lack of response to your previous suggestion (election)
might have been due to nobody wanting to take this all to himself, all
rather hoping you would carry on.

Could we divide the position into sub-tasks, most of them more similar
to simple package management? The following list of possible sub-tasks
is not well thought through, only an illustration:

1. Authority to take final decisions (in case of lack of discussion,
   or of ambiguous result of discussion) on inclusion/exclusion of
   packages and all important issues of strategy. This could even be
   assigned to a group of persons, with an order of precedence as a
   fallback for the case that they can't come to a majority decision.

2. Web-page maintanance.

3. Package release mangagement.

4. The generate_html package is already separatly maintained by
   Julien, who is generally open to contributions by others.

5. Further development of the pkg suite. I'm not wholly aware of the
   current maintanance status there. But I think there should be a
   responsible person, with write access.

6. What else? ...

I faintly remember that something similar has already been discussed,
but I can't recall the details, forgive me.

Carnë, what is your own opinion to this? Maybe you would even be
willing to take over one of the subtasks? Maybe even task 1., possibly
together with others in a group?

BTW: To have some election system would seem good to me. It could even
be used for details, not only for choosing leaders. Currently
decisions are taken based on comments of those who happen to take part
in the discussion.

Olaf

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