Improving community participation in Amanda release process

Hello,

There has been much recent discussion in amanda-hackers, and -users 
about testing and support for the wide variety of platforms and 
architectures on which Amanda runs, and the wide variety of 
configurations in which folks use it.  Amanda's ability to compile and 
run on a wide variety of operating systems and platforms is one of its 
key strengths, and the amanda hacker community is of course committed to 
Amanda's heterogeneous support.

Several people have expressed an interest in helping to test and/or 
support the environments in which they are knowledgeable.  After 
discussion with some other developers and Zmanda folks, We would like to 
formalize this process a bit.  Here's the proposal:

The community keeps a centralized list of "platform experts" for each 
environment, perhaps on the Amanda wiki.  Experts will be a point of 
contact for questions regarding that environment, both from users and 
from developers.  Programming experience isn't be required, but a 
healthy familiarity with the environment is important.  Hopefully, we 
will have enough people for each environment that this will not be a burden.

When the time for a release comes around, the experts will build and 
thoroughly test each beta release, and report any problems back to the 
amanda-hackers list.  The final release will be made when the experts 
agree that it is ready.

Of course, the core Amanda team will continue to support all available 
architectures, as has been the case since the beginning.

What are your thoughts?  Will you pitch in?

Jean-Louis