Re: GNU maintainership update

[Bertrand Garrigues]

Hi Branden,

On mar., juil. 30 2024 at 06:44:42 , "G. Branden Robinson" 
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes it should take a bit of time,

>
> 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.

This is doable for me, although not immediately (I'm starting my summer
vacations...)

> 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.

Thanks a lot for you kind words.  My work on the knuth-plass branch is
also interesting, I hope some day I can finish it (although it's quite
challenging to connect my code to the existing code base).

Regards,

Bertrand