[arch-dev-public] My status
Hello all, Given the current discussion, I believe it is appropriate for me to provide a status update as far as my role within the Arch community is concerned. As a father of three (soon four!) I don't have much time at my disposal, and would like to concentrate the little I have on other open-source projects I am involved in. But I am well-aware that stepping down right now would leave you with yet another bunch of orphan packages, including the texlive-* ones, which is really not what you guys need at this moment. I am thus proposing this: I'll stay on board and will continue maintaining my stuff until we have found someone who is ready to take up maintainance of the texlive packages. I have written a collection of helper scripts for this purpose which are publically available on our projects page. Of course I'd also be available for help. So that should be feasible by anyone who uses TeX Live already, knows its internals moderately well (configuration files and tools, web2c, kpathsea, etc), and is not afraid of complex build processes. I hope this can be achieved within the next, say, six months, but hopefully sooner, since our baby is expected early April and I won't have much time in the three months thereafter. Ideally that person should be one of you, which would make things very easy, but I don't think this is realistic, given the workload you already have. There is also the possibility of moving the texlive pkgs back to community if a TU is interested, but I'd really prefer they stay in extra. In other words, you can still count on me, but not for too long ;) In the meanwhile, if anyone is interested in a particular package I maintain, just ask and I'll orphan it. Regards, François
On 10/02/10 21:26, Firmicus wrote:
Hello all,
<snip> As a father of three (soon four!) I don't have much time at my disposal
Wow... That is just crazy! I have one child and if I extrapolate, I can not see how you find enough time in the day to deal with that many. :P Allan
On 10/02/2010 13:07, Allan McRae wrote:
On 10/02/10 21:26, Firmicus wrote:
Hello all,
<snip> As a father of three (soon four!) I don't have much time at my disposal
Wow... That is just crazy! I have one child and if I extrapolate, I can not see how you find enough time in the day to deal with that many. :P
Fortunately it is not a linear function :) Two are *more* than twice as demanding as one, but beyond that, it increases like a log function... And it becomes really easy once they start watching TV the whole day. Eh, just kidding :P
Am 10.02.2010 12:26, schrieb Firmicus:
I am thus proposing this: I'll stay on board and will continue maintaining my stuff until we have found someone who is ready to take up maintainance of the texlive packages. I have written a collection of helper scripts for this purpose which are publically available on our projects page. Of course I'd also be available for help. So that should be feasible by anyone who uses TeX Live already, knows its internals moderately well (configuration files and tools, web2c, kpathsea, etc), and is not afraid of complex build processes. I hope this can be achieved within the next, say, six months, but hopefully sooner, since our baby is expected early April and I won't have much time in the three months thereafter. Ideally that person should be one of you, which would make things very easy, but I don't think this is realistic, given the workload you already have. There is also the possibility of moving the texlive pkgs back to community if a TU is interested, but I'd really prefer they stay in extra.
I definitely want to keep texlive in extra, we have lots of packages depending on it. I also love that we have the latest and greatest of it - I have a direct comparison to SuSE, they have texlive-2007 within their 11.1 release, lacking tons of features that I need (especially tikz-related). We brought you on especially for texlive, and I would at any time bring on someone new to only maintain texlive. I would even prefer if you could "mentor" him or her on the usage of your scripts for a few weeks so it all runs smoothly. While I don't have the time or energy to maintain it myself, I will do everything else in my power to keep texlive working as well as it does now!
On 10/02/2010 13:18, Thomas Bächler wrote:
Am 10.02.2010 12:26, schrieb Firmicus:
I am thus proposing this: I'll stay on board and will continue maintaining my stuff until we have found someone who is ready to take up maintainance of the texlive packages. I have written a collection of helper scripts for this purpose which are publically available on our projects page. Of course I'd also be available for help. So that should be feasible by anyone who uses TeX Live already, knows its internals moderately well (configuration files and tools, web2c, kpathsea, etc), and is not afraid of complex build processes. I hope this can be achieved within the next, say, six months, but hopefully sooner, since our baby is expected early April and I won't have much time in the three months thereafter. Ideally that person should be one of you, which would make things very easy, but I don't think this is realistic, given the workload you already have. There is also the possibility of moving the texlive pkgs back to community if a TU is interested, but I'd really prefer they stay in extra.
I definitely want to keep texlive in extra, we have lots of packages depending on it. I also love that we have the latest and greatest of it - I have a direct comparison to SuSE, they have texlive-2007 within their 11.1 release, lacking tons of features that I need (especially tikz-related).
We brought you on especially for texlive, and I would at any time bring on someone new to only maintain texlive. I would even prefer if you could "mentor" him or her on the usage of your scripts for a few weeks so it all runs smoothly. While I don't have the time or energy to maintain it myself, I will do everything else in my power to keep texlive working as well as it does now!
Yes, that's what I implied above. I will happily mentor the new maintainer. I hope this will happen sooner than later, but on the other hand, the packages are fresh and shining and won't need to be updated for a while[¹], so this mentoring could as well occur next summer. F [¹] Users can still keep their system up-to-date in their TEXMFLOCAL tree with my utility texlive-localmanager in AUR.
participants (3)
-
Allan McRae
-
Firmicus
-
Thomas Bächler