[Savannah-hackers-public] co-maintaining GNU automake

[Karl Berry]

Hi Jim,

I hereby appoint you as another co-maintainer of GNU automake,
with Ralf and Stefano.  Thanks for volunteering.

Being a package maintainer is a relationship between you personally
and the GNU Project.  The maintainer or maintainers are the ones
who take the overall responsibility for the work done on the package.
If you recruit others to contribute to the package (and some packages
have hundreds of contributors), they work under your supervision.

The GNU Project will sometimes need to talk with you, sometimes
privately, so please make sure we know a personal email address which
you read frequently.  We normally publish these email addresses in the
Free Software Directory.  We would also like to know other ways to get
in touch with you if email fails; we do not give them out.

If you ever want to step down as maintainer, or would like someone
else to replace you, please talk with address@hidden and address@hidden
about it.  When a package has no maintainer, we need to know about the
problem so we can look for a new one.  Likewise, if you think someone
else should join you as co-maintainer or take over from you as
maintainer, please talk with us, since we will need to establish a
relationship with that person.

The GNU maintainer information in http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/
describes a lot of procedures for GNU maintainers.  It also
describes who you can ask for various kinds of support or advice.  If
you encounter a situation where it isn't clear what to do, you can
also ask address@hidden, which is a list of a few other GNU
maintainers who have offered to answer questions for new maintainers.

We will add you to the gnu-prog mailing list, a moderated list for
announcements to GNU maintainers.  We will also add you to the
gnu-prog-discuss list, which can be used for discussion among GNU
maintainers, but whether to stay on the list is up to you.

Please send a note to gnu-prog-discuss now with a brief description of
your package, so that other GNU developers will learn about it.

We strongly recommend using ftp.gnu.org to make distributions
available.  Please see the GNU maintainers guide for the procedure,
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Automated-FTP-Uploads.html.
When that is set up, you'll be able to do uploads yourself.  If you
want to also distribute the package from a site of your own, that is
fine.  To use some other site instead of ftp.gnu.org is acceptable,
provided it allows connections from anyone anywhere.

Please write or update the web pages about the program, to put in
http://www.gnu.org/software/PROGNAME.  These pages should be the
main web site for the program, and they should really have the
information for users, not just a link to another site; please use
http://www.gnu.org/software/PROGNAME whenever you give out the URL
for the home page of the program.  Please don't set up a "site for the
program" anywhere else--if you want to do work on additional web pages
about the program, please put them on www.gnu.org.

(It is ok to put pages that address developers-only topics on another
site, and likewise for pages that access databases.)

In writing the web pages, please follow the style guidelines in
http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html.   See also
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Web-Pages.html.

We ask that you register your package on Savannah, at least to maintain
your package's web pages.  This is independent of where the actual
program sources are hosted (although we encourage you to use Savannah
for that too).  This makes it easy to update the web pages, since you
will have access to a CVS repository for the web pages and can update it
as you like.  Using Savannah will help the GNU Project in other ways,
too.  To set this up, visit http://savannah.gnu.org/.

If your package was already being developed on Savannah as nongnu, email
address@hidden and ask them to mark it there as a GNU
package.  This should happen without your intervention, but feel free to
ask them if a day or two has gone by without the change being made.

Please also write an entry or a change for the page
http://www.gnu.org/people/people.html, and mail that to
address@hidden  Note that we don't want to talk about
proprietary software, so if you have worked on any, please don't
mention it here.  Your entry can include a link to your home page
provided it fits our usual criteria for what we link to.

Please make sure that the program has an up-to-date entry in our Free
Software Directory.  See directory.fsf.org.  If it needs updating,
please write address@hidden to arrange that.  See
http://www.gnu.org/help/directory.html#adding-entries for the details
which are needed.

Mailing lists: Your package should already have a mailing list
address@hidden for reporting bugs.  If not, please create it--see
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Mail.html for the details of
creating mailing lists.

Some GNU programs with many users have another mailing list,
address@hidden, for people to ask other users for help.  If
your program has many users, you should create such a list for it.
For a fairly new program, which doesn't have a large user base yet, it
is better not to bother with this.

Please post announcements of new releases of the program to
address@hidden  Include a brief description of the program so people
can tell whether they are interested in using it.  The announcement
should mention the web pages on www.gnu.org, and say where to get the
program by ftp.

You can also send announcements to a special list address@hidden
for your program if you think that is warranted.  (This list should be
moderated.)

Please also mention release announcements in the news feed of the
savannah project site, <http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/PROGNAME>.
The news feeds from the GNU project are aggregated at
<http://planet.gnu.org/>.

For more details about writing and publicizing announcements, please see
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Announcements.html.

For details on all policies and recommendations for GNU packages,
please see the GNU maintainers information, at
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/, and GNU coding standards, at
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/.

new-gnu people, could you please enter Jim Meyering in
gnuorg/maintainers?