Re: Where is the maintainer?

[Michael Taylor]

Hello Michael,

I am subscribed to both info-sather and bug-sather.  I have been
maintaining GNU Sather for about 2 years now and in that time I
believe that I have responded to all GNU Sather mailing list queries
(with the exception of Dr. Dussault's request.  After getting this
message, I didn't remember the question so I searched my archives and
saw that it went unanswered.  I was on vacation around then and must
have missed it when I got back and checked my email.)  I checked the
online archives and noticed that the replies weren't on there.  That
is my fault for not realizing I wasn't replying-all in my online email
interface.  I actually don't maintain the lists.  That is done by GNU
volunteers.  They weed out the spam and do most of the other
maintenance.  Also, in the past two years of maintaining GNU Sather,
I've only gotten about a dozen help requests/bug notices and most
(about 3/4) of those were mailed directly to my email account, outside
of the list.  Those two lists are a nightmare of spam.  It makes them
almost worthless to anybody that isn't subscribed to the list since
their email might be easily tossed out with the spam.  The only
solution I know of to this is to make them member-only lists.  I'm
open to any other ideas, though.

As to the list of bugs.  The only one that I'm aware of is the one in
Dr. Dussault's email regarding the Tk Browser.  There are many other
areas that could be improved, etc. that I know of, though (pSather
needs to be updated, build needs to be made easier, Windows support
would be nice, etc.)  Due to the extremely low volume of GNU Sather
traffic, I mostly assume that there isn't much interest in the
language except for research and legacy programs.  For that reason,
I've just maintained it and haven't added any new features or risked
upsetting legacy code.  However, I am interested in Sather as a
language, especially the pSather extension and how it could help
programming today's multi-core processors.  I would be interested in
helping to modernize GNU Sather if there is some interest.  The
Savannah page would be a good central place for development and I own
the domain sather-lang.org that I wanted to use as a central point of
Sather information.

I checked the numbers for the lists.  There's around 8 people plus a
couple of mailing-list bots subscribed to bug-sather and around 50
people plus some bots on info-sather.

Hope this info helps.  Let me know if you are interested in helping in
any area of GNU Sather development.  I'm at work now, but I'll look
into the Tk Browser issue when I get home tonight.

-- Michael R. Taylor

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 5:40 AM, Sather User<address@hidden> wrote:
> Michael R. Taylor, GNU Linux maintainer:
>
> Are you subscribed to this list?
>
> And have you responded to messages to the list in recent years by
> people who have had difficulty with Sather syntax?
>
> And is a fix in progess, a patch available, any plans, for the browser
> bug reported by Dr Dussault on 15 Aug 2008?
>
> Is there a list of open bugs to which that one has been added?
>
> Please answer (by a message to the list) if you are subscribed,
> whether or not you are ready to answer these questions fully.
>
> I notice that Mailman does not allow me to retrieve the names of list
> members with "who <password>".  It is a Mailman command but it has
> been disabled.
>
> That being so, please inform subscrbers of the numbers of them
> subscribed to the sather info and bug lists.  Please send a message to
> these lists informing us of the two numbers.
>
> --
> Michael Talbot-Wilson
>
>
>