[Savannah-hackers] Request for hosting of AUC TeX

[David Kastrup]

AUC TeX is the most commonly used TeX/LaTeX shell for both Emacs and
XEmacs, and is released under the GPL.  The current maintainer, Per
Abrahamsen, has asked me to take over maintenance.  I would like to
host it on Savannah.  Having read your conditions, I would like to ask
whether this is feasible.  In particular:

As to "support non-free software": TeX is available for a vast number
of platforms, including some proprietary distributions.  If particular
fixes/configurations are needed to get AUC TeX play nice with them, I
would not want to be prohibited from providing and documenting them.
It is a priority of mine to get stuff working with free software (and,
to be honest, Windows ports can be a royal pain at times), but where
volunteers are available that would take the brunt work of such
porting work from me, I would not want to turn them down.  In a
similar vein, I would not want to be kept from providing fixes that
might be necessary for getting things play nice with AFPL GhostScript
versions (which become GPLed in due course, anyway).

I can't guarantee that the software at the current point of time
meets all the criteria for GNU projects: for example, at the current
point of time an autoconf-based installation is absent.  Once the
software is hosted off Savannah, I believe to have better
possibilities to recruit people for working on such deficiencies, but
I can't guarantee a time frame for them.  We would probably be
offering RedHat RPM files in addition to tarballs since one of the
preview-latex developers (another project of mine) is rolling them
anyway.  I'd be glad to offer things like Debian packages or similar
if volunteers for that turn up, but I can't make any promises of who
will contribute in what manner.

Personally, I would prefer to have copyright assigned to the FSF, but
this would have to be cleared with all previous contributors, of
course.  For myself, I have signed the appropriate papers concerning
Emacs development (though I somehow don't seem to remember getting
that dollar mentioned as recompensation in your reply letter.  A big
fat silver dollar would be nice... but I digress).

My current account at Savannah is "dak".  I am also main author of
the preview-latex WYSIWYG editing package that is hosted off
SourceForge (and I'll probably keep it there for historical reasons,
mostly).

Please tell me whether you would find it feasible or appropriate if I
tried to host AUC TeX off Savannah.

Thanks,

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum