Re: [Evolution-hackers] Evolution Maintainership

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Tue, 2005-05-03 at 14:59 +0530, JP Rosevear wrote:
> This mail is to announce a change in Evolution maintainership.  

> My job inside Novell is changing, and I am moving on to work more on
> the desktop itself -- on GNOME proper.  It's a chance for me
> to help improve the basic desktop experience in GNOME, and though I
> have enjoyed my years on Evolution, it will be nice to work
> on the desktop itself again.  I will be taking several "veteran"
> Evolution developers with me.  We have worked long and hard on
> Evolution these last 4-5 years, and we'll miss it, but great things
> await us on the desktop.

Okay. I'm looking forward to reading about and using the many
improvements you guys are going to make. There's lots of work so, lots
of fun :p.

> Given that maintainership of Evolution is such a large job and I
> couldn't continue to do it in my new role, I'm passing the mantle to
> Harish Krishnaswamy ('harish').  Harish is a smart and personable guy,
> and has been one of the best and most passionate hackers we've had on
> Evolution.  Besides his work on Evolution the last 18 months, he is
> one of the founding members of GNOME Bangalore (gnomebangalore.org),
> and has traveled throughout India promoting GNOME and free software
> through hackfests, CD giveaways, and mentoring.

Poor Harish. He'll immediately have a huge job tracking the many patches
that are still waiting for HEAD to reopen :p.

Nevertheless I welcome Harish as maintainer of Evolution. I hope the
Evolution hackers and other contributors will do too.

> If you haven't met Harish yet, you should come to his EPlugin talk at
> GUADEC this year.

I'll be there :). Listening.

> This maintainership change is effective immediately for work in HEAD
> (in fact Harish did the first 2.3 release :-), and in a few short
> weeks for the stable gnome-2-10/2.2 branch.
> 
> Its been a great few years on Evolution, and we appreciate and thank
> everyone who has made this such a fun project to be a part of.  There
> has been a recent uptick in developer interest in Evolution, which I am
> sure will continue under Harish's stewardship.

IMHO can documenting the code and making sure it's building procedures
are stable help a lot. The go-evolution wiki is a very interesting
documentation project that should (imho) grow. Also improving the
developer section of the website. Adding contact information and making
it easy to know who is maintaining which evolution-module can ease
contributing.

Maintaining a large project is (imho) also making sure starting to
contribute is easy and enjoyable :p.

Perhaps more GNOME bounties can also improve developer interest (some
developers decide to stick around after they finished such a bounty :p).
But I'm not sure whether companies and/or organisations like for example
Novell are planning to spend more on such bounties. It shouldn't be the
only reason for contributing. The main reason should be "because it's
fun" :p. Of course.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.pvanhoof.be/