Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 20:04:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom Lord lord@emf.net Subject: [arch-users] GNU, doc foo, short-term plans, hacking suggestions, money

arch has officially been dubbed "GNU arch".

That means, among other things, that it will gain a proper web page at gnu.org (which I'll have to maintain), will be distributed from ftp.gnu.org, and can count on a tiny bit of friendly inter-project mediation with other GNU projects by the FSF. This is a good thing, IMO, but it does mean I have some work to do getting the gnu.org infrastructure for arch up to snuff. There's an option here to set up some gnu-mediated mailing lists (and a requirement to direct bug-arch somewhere, as well).

In other news, James Blackwell has offered, and I've accepted the offer, that he will take over maintenance of the tutorial. It will take a few days to fully transfer control over those sources to him. Thank you James!

Contributions to the tutorial have been increasingly noticeably. As an _experiment_, I'm thinking of taking a (mostly, not entirely) hands-off approach to its future evolution. Debian aside, when there start to be several, substantial, independent contributors to documentation, as opposed to just one central copyright owner -- there the oft rehearsed "problems" with the GFDL can actually turn from "problems" to problems. (At least that's _my_ twisted view of the matter.) Therefore, as part of the process of transferring the docs to jblack, while I'm still the sole copyright holder, I'll be changing the license to something less problematic -- less controversial. (Asuffield, heads up: Undoubtedly as a side effect, the docs will become Debian friendly. Y'all are still wrong, though. :-)

My short term plans:

*) Crunch through the patch queue.

*) Establish branches for the "big three" new features I'm ideally supposed to be working on. (I'll be using these branches as a vehical to experiment by-hand with what auto-patch-factoring features might do).

*) Set-up infrastructure for GNU arch releases.

*) Make the next round of releases.

*) Hopefully, then, return to work on the "big three" new features (=tagging-method generalizations, inode-signature optimization, partial commits).

My sense of priorities has shifted slightly, lately. Roughly, in terms of (extra-economic) demand: =tagging-method / partial commits / inode-signature.

Hacking suggestions:

Relative to history, anyway, patches are pouring in for things like: simple bug fixes, CLI improvements, help message improvements. These are all great, thanks, and more are welcome.

A big open area, easy to do, hence not among my priorities: expand the set of callouts-to-hooks and start to build a library of ready-made hook implementations. I've given some suggestions (e.g., magic-mirrors, magic-revlibs). Maybe these suggestions aren't interesting enough to be "itchy" to people -- but some of the arch-users discussion traffic suggests otherwise.

Money:

There's a couple of promising developments _on_the_horizon_. Nothing that will make me rich or anything -- but enough to keep me eating and pay utilities, mostly, with some regularity.

But it's _on_the_horizon_ -- not real yet. And while I'm good for the next 5 business days --- that's about it. So, as usual, "when the hat comes round! :-)" (and, more interestingly, if you are at a business -- have you considered the commercial offers mentioned at (http:) arch.quackerhead.com/~lord and regexps.srparish.net/www?)

Regards. Thanks, all, for all the recent patches. Doing my best to catch up. Yadda Yadda Yadda....

-t

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=lord%40emf.net&item_name=support+...

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