GNU maintainership update

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi folks,

I've heard back from Bertrand Garrigues, and he advised that I start the
hand-off process for GNU maintainership of the groff package/project.

I have consequently contacted maintainers@gnu to initiate that process.
Neither of us have a clear idea how long it will take, but he seemed
confident that it wouldn't resemble an overnight procedure.

Bertrand agreed that a 1/year cadence for groff releases sounded good,
and said he'd be available to perform maintainer duties (mainly release
management for 1.24.0 later this year) as long as they were (in my own
wording) no more burdensome than those he had to handle for the groff
1.23.0 release.

Bertrand's contributions of (1) migration to GNU Automake for our build
system, (2) inclusion of gnulib as a C portability library, and (3)
inauguration of an automated test suite for the code base have in my
estimation delivered major benefits to the maintainability of groff; all
were strongly forward-looking choices not necessarily easily appreciated
directly by users.  The test harness alone has ensured that many
bugs and mistakes never landed in the Git repository in the first place.

As a developer, I would have found groff much less approachable and far
more frustrating had it not been for Bertrand's improvements.

Bertrand has been quiet for a while but his positive impact on groff is
unmistakable to a software engineer's eyes.

I hope you will join me in thanking him for his excellent work.

Regards,
Branden

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