Howdy folks, Those of you who have been following the debian-devel or debian-x mailing lists closely will already be aware of some of this, but I thought the time was ripe for an official announcement. Debian's XFree86 packages are becoming team-maintained. In practice they have always been to some extent, thanks to contributions large and small from many people (grep the xfree86 package changelog for "thanks" sometime). Now, however, the nature of XFree86 package maintenance is changing in a more fundamental way. I've been happy to maintain Debian's XFree86 packages for the past five years, but as my responsibilities for Debian and the larger Free Software community have grown and come to demand more of my time, I have found myself less able to give XFree86 packaging the obsessive, single-minded attention it requires. The obvious and reasonable solution to this problem is delegation and power-sharing. I have established a Subversion repository at necrotic.deadbeast.net[1], and several people from the Debian "X Strike Force", which includes myself and other subscribers to the debian-x mailing list, have commit access to this repository. The Debian X Strike Force repository is publicly browsable via the World Wide Web: http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ With the Debian XFree86 packages under version control, I expect the quality and pace of the work to increase. A publicly browsable repository also makes it people for the curious to find out what people are working on, and what changes are forthcoming. That established, I'd like to introduce the team of committers as presently constituted: Daniel Stone, who is primarily getting 4.3.0 unstable-release-ready; ISHIKAWA Mutsumi, a jack of all trades who, among other things, understands X-TT better than I ever will; Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, IPv6 integration support specialist; Juliusz Chroboczek, font technologist extraordinaire; Joel Baker, Debian/*BSD assimilator; Branden Robinson, integrator and release flunky While at present I conceive of myself as likely the only package uploader, that conception may change in the near future. The membership of the committing team is not closed! If there is some particular aspect of the XFree86 Debian package that you're interested in, please send a brief proposal to the debian-x mailing list describing what you'd like to work on. I don't intend for there to be a high-barrier to entry, and in fact no one has yet asked for access who didn't get it. Moreover, no one except me has screwed up the repository. :) XFree86, even just the issues relevant to Debian packaging, is a big, complex of software and deserves a correspondingly large and dedicated team. People who follow XFree86 CVS upstream with an eye on backportable bugfixes are highly desired, as are people with particular interest in chipset drivers or architecture-specific issues. So, that's where XFree86 Debian package development is going. I'm doing my best to get it out of the single-maintainer Dark Ages and into the collaborative, version-controlled Middle Ages. ;-) I welcome your comments and suggestions. [1] Why not alioth.debian.net? Because Subversion is still alpha-quality software (though pretty solid by that standard) and a project as large as XFree86 is bound to put some load on it. I and the rest of the team can work more efficiently if I maintain close administrative supervision of the machine. -- G. Branden Robinson | I have a truly elegant proof of the Debian GNU/Linux | above, but it is too long to fit branden@debian.org | into this .signature file. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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