Supporting Gtk+ Maintenance

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

Hello Foundation Board.

The Gtk+ project is in dire lack of new maintainers, mostly to review
patches, so that bugs can be fixed and new features can be introduced.
We need suggestions for candidates, probably for particular sub-sections
of Gtk+. Ideally, these candidates would be employed to work on Gtk+.

To avoid any misunderstandings, the project is not in lack of more
patches or code contributions, what it lacks is the human resources
to handle the flow of incoming patches and bug reports, and do code
maintenance work.

A more in-depth description of this situation can be found here:
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2006-December/msg00074.html

In response to that write up, various people have made suggestions to
improve the situation and asked for opportunities or ways to help.
Some of these suggestions involve the Gnome foundation board and Gnome
advisory board, which is why I'm writing you.

A lot of companies are involved in Gnome and Gtk+ at this point, and
probably can be expected to have a vivid self interest in our core
technologies to stay reliable and properly maintained. In order to help
to achieve this, this can be done:

* Companies (especially those on the advisory board) can submit names
  of developers (employees) who can be put on the task of Gtk+
  maintenance.
  Ideally, the developers should already have experience with Gtk+
  project contributions, and they should be team-oriented and
  communicative to be able to develop a good work relationship with
  the existing Gtk+ community.

* The Gtk+ project would like to see those people work full time if
  possible, but regular part time assistance can also help a lot.

* These positions must not be limited to work on constrained feature
  sets only. There are enough limited scope/feature bound contributions
  already. As a consequence, there is a strong need for more general
  involvement and maintenance work like cleanups, regression fixes,
  refactorings and similar things.

So for the foundation board, there are two things that can be done
to improve the current situation:

1) Please present the issue at hand (this email and the email linked
   to above) to the advisory board members, to make sure the companies
   involved are aware of the situation. And if possible, spread the
   word to other involved parties or (non advisory) companies.

2) Please investigate if the hiring/sponsoring of a full time Gtk+
   maintainer position by the Gnome foundation is also a possibility.

---
ciaoTJ