My future GNUstep contribution

[Fred Kiefer]

Dear GNUsteppers,

as some of you may have noticed I was on a break from the project for
some time. This hiatus was caused by the way Greg reacted on the mail
from Johannes on RMS. Just to state the obvious, I think that Johannes
was wrong here, still he deserved a friendlier reply. I was not
surprised that Johannes choose to quit the project. The tone on the
GNUstep mailing lists, and sadly on many free software projects, is
often very unfriendly.
After this I needed some time to think about what my role in such a
project should be. Why would I subject myself to treatments in my spare
time that I would not accept in a payed position?
The result of all this thinking is that I still want to contribute to
this project, for which I have worked more than twenty years. But I will
scale down my involvement. I would like to give up on chores that I
never enjoyed and work on fun stuff like problem analysis and bug fixing.

There are three main jobs that I would like to pass on:
- Maintainership of GNUstep gui and back. Here it would be great if
somebody could at least take over the review of Greg's pull requests.
Somehow we are not able to sort out our communication and this results
in a rather frustrating experience for me.
- Package building on OSB
(https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/X11:GNUstep). Here an update to
the latest GNUstep release would be needed and there is a lot room for
further improvements.
- Coverity Scan for GNUstep base
(https://scan.coverity.com/projects/gnustep-base?tab=overview). I use a
docker image to create these metrics and at the beginning of the year I
wanted to improve on that script and even extend it to cover gui as
well. Now I would rather pass this on to somebody else.

If you are interested to take over one of these jobs, please contact me
directly. I will stay out of further mailing list discussion but will
still be around to help developers and users with their issues.

Cheers,
Fred