Re: New maintainer

[Jiří Techet <techet gmail com>]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 05:30, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin
<pierre-luc pierlux com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As most of you already know, I am handing over maintainership of
> libchamplain to Jiří Techet. He's been very active in the community
> lately, committing changes I didn't dare to begin to write.
>
> I simply didn't have much time left to get libchamplain where it could
> go and I believe Jiří will get it there.
>
> Keep it up!
>
> Pierre-Luc
>

Hi everyone,

first of all I'd like to thank very much to Pierre-Luc for his hard
work on libchamplain. It's really fascinating to look at the git log
and see what was there at the beginning not even two years back and
compare it with into what libchamplain has evolved since then. And by
looking at the core sources of libchamplain, it's mostly Pierre-Luc's
work.

I also like many design decisions Pierre-Luc has made - first of all
that libchamplain is a library that can be shared by many
applications. There are plenty of various map-viewing applications,
each of them reimplementing the same map viewer again and again, so
creating a map-displaying widget is a really good and useful idea.
Second, the software technologies used for libchamplain are very well
chosen - the use of clutter as a central part of libchamplain
simplifies a lot of things and makes the resulting map look really
cool. Also the other dependencies of libchamplain are very standard
ones, all usually preinstalled on new gnome desktops, which makes
libchamplain very easy to deploy. And who knows, maybe one day
libchamplain will just be one of those libraries that automatically
come with your OS (forget about Windows here :-). And finally, I also
like the overall architecture of libchamplain. Even though there are a
few things I would like to change, the library is quite modular and
not one big piece of monolithic mess. Thanks to Pierre-Luc for all
that!

Now since all the hard work is done, this is where my part in the
project comes - to become famous for it :-). Well, that wouldn't be
fair so I should do some work first. First of all I'd like to prepare
the 0.6 release. You might have noticed we are quite behind the gnome
schedule but I'd really like to have 0.8 in sync with the rest of
gnome. (There is also the possibility not to release anything now and
make a release of 0.6 together with gnome 3.0 but since the trunk is
quite stable now and there have been _many_ changes during this
release cycle, I'd prefer to release 0.6 in the near future.)

First I would like to apply the patch I have proposed here

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/libchamplain-list/2010-April/msg00003.html

which makes it possible to compile libchamplain without memphis
support. Please let me know if there is something fundamentally wrong
with it or if it complicates bindings preparation. Otherwise I'm going
to apply it.

Second, I'd like to know from the bindings maintainers what the status
of their bindings is and how much time they expect it will take to
update them for 0.6. This will influence further planning. If I'm not
mistaken, the maintainers of current bindings are

Victor - Python
Emmanuel - Perl
Tomaž - Vala

I'm not sure about the status of the "managed" bindings. Are they
still being actively maintained? If not, I would consider removing
them from the distribution.

Is anyone aware of any blockers or serious bugs in the mainline? Does
anyone have any patches he feels that should appear in 0.6? Are there
any pending patches that I haven't noticed and that should be
reviewed? Please let me know.

Since this is my very first experience being a maintainer of an open
source project, there is a very high probability I'll screw up
something horribly sooner or later. Please be patient with me.

Cheers,

Jiri