[Gnu-arch-users] why is Tom so slow these days?

[Tom Lord]

    > From: address@hidden

    > I posted the same thing as a feature request to the bugs list;
    > but have not heard anything since.


I have definately been testing the community's patience recently, for
which I apologize and ask continued indulgence for just a _little_
while longer.

There are plenty of good bug reports and merge requests queued up.  I
have quite a bit of "catching up" to do, I admit.

On the other hand, tla is currently in a pretty stable and useful
state.  I don't think that I'm really abusing my discretion or
creating a crisis by being a _little_bit_ slow at this particular
juncture.

What's going on is that I'm doing the groundwork for a new project,
leading up to its initial release.  Once that's done (and perhaps
before if I hit some blockage in the new project) I do indeed intend
to catch up on arch like catching up was going out of style.

The timing of all this is amusing, at least from my perspective.  I
think it might have something to do with the weather: arch was started
in a mad scramble during November of 2000; now here it is November
again, three years later, and I'm back in that mode.

I consider arch to be fairly successful by some metrics.  Let's hope
the new project will be similarly so.   I hope that the coincidence of
timing is a good omen.

Now, that said:  

As much as we've speculated that arch is just about ideal for
"hierarchical gatekeepers" modes of developement -- for the pattern of
"trusted lieutenants" who do some of the work of integrating work from
a tree-structure of contributors, the tla patch-flow tree right now is
rather shallow: everyone just sends everything to me, in effect.

A _subset_ of the regular gnu-arch-users folks are certainly qualified
to become (conservative, I hope) second-level gatekeepers -- to do
some of the merging work I'm neglecting, presumably with the idea that
I'll eventually add that to my GNU releases.

I wonder two things:

        ~ whether there are qualified people (more precisely, people
          known to me to be qualified) interested in taking on that 
          role, perhaps even making interim releases between my
          periods of catching up

        ~ if there are such, whether or not it is time to at least
          begin exploring more interesting financial arrangements --
          so that the busking of the arch project is for the project
          rather than just me personally.  (I assure you: not only is 
          it difficult to figure out how to implement this, but in
          addition, it is about as far from a "get rich quick" scheme
          as you could possibly imagine.   Assume, minimally, that it
          will take a few months to even make an arrangement and set
          up the infrastructure to implement it.)

We've had one failed experiment along these lines already with the
documentation (the co-maintainership thing, not the financial foo).
It is, at the least, a _very_serious_commitment_ (more than you
probably think at first) to join maintainership.  To quote admiral
James T. Kirk "I take it the odds are against us and the situation's
grim".  But I thought I'd at least remark on the possibility.


-t