Maciej as maintainer! [was Re: I resign as Guile maintainer]

["Greg J. Badros" <gjb at cs dot washington dot edu>]

mstachow@alum.mit.edu writes:

> I can volunteer to do it. I will be starting employment with a free
> software company in a week, and they have agreed to let me spend 5-6
> hours a week on the job to do Guile work if I become the maintainer. I
> have not had much chance to be involved with Guile of late due to
> other commitments, but I have followed the lists and watched the
> development, and thanks to my upcoming employer's generosity, I would
> be able to make a firm time commitment to this.

This is fantastic, and I am all for Maciej returning to the Guile scene
as maintainer!

> However, if someone who is qualified and can devote more time than this
> is available, I would defer in favor of them.
> 
> If offered the position, I expect to spend most of the time
> integrating the code of others, promoting Guile to the community and
> trying to address perceived and real shortcomings, rather than
> launching ambitious new development projects myself; I think right now
> Guile mainly needs to be seen as more widely usable more than it needs
> any particular feature, and there are already many people working on
> most of the key features that are needed long-term.

Agreed.

> I think the most important specific priorities right now are
> documentation (first a thorough and complete reference manual, then a
> user's guide), and the perceived performance problems, which are
> mainly caused by the startup time. These are the two top issues cited
> as reasons for not using Guile as the (or one of the) extension
> language(s) for a project.


Yes and yes.  It's not a perceived performance problem with Scwm-- it's
a very real issue with startup times in excess of 30 seconds on pretty
powerful machine (PIII-400 class)

> I would be even happier about a co-maintainership arrangement with one
> or two other people; that way, if any one person is subject to a time
> crunch, the project can keep moving and keep up a public face.

There are a bunch of us who have time to devote and have many of the
privileges that go with maintaining, so it's not the case that you'd be
going it alone.  I've already volunteered to help coordinate the
docstring and perhaps the complete documentation efforts.

Congrats on your upcoming new position, Maciej, and welcome back!

Greg