Re: XEmacs at a crossroads

[Resending because I by mistake sent to the announce list which of course
bounced so you did not see it . Sorry for that. For completeness here is
another go at it.]

Hi Stephen,

>>>>>> Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
> That leaves option 4, or maybe a new "option 5" if somebody has a good
> suggestion.

[...]

> For those who wish to continue using or developing XEmacs, we have
> commitments from at least two of the infrastructure contributors to
> provide minimal support for
>
>     - mailing lists
>     - tracker
>     - website
>     - source code repositories
>     - package buildbot
>     - binary packages
>
> While binary package releases will continue to be provided in
> "Pre-Releases", there are no plans yet for a full SUMO release.  It's
> quite possible, but there are some resource details (space on the
> distribution site) to work out.

To me the minimal support lists as given above sounds quite a bit as business
as usual for us. So I suggest an option 5 where we change the infrastructure
to be more in level with our activities.

That could mean:

  - Protect the mailing lists from spam by just allowing posts from
    members. This ought to reduce the maintenance needs I hope.

  - Drop mailing lists we don't use much. Could xemacs-patches go into
    xemacs-beta or even move over to use pull requests at bitbucket?

  - Drop the buildbots. With no or few commits coming it is not worth the time
    and resources spent maintaining them.

  - Replace the old web pages with a simple static website on bitbucket. This
    will remove in one stroke a lot of info that is aged and wrong. Just
    supply the very necessary information possibly by lifting over the
    valuable pages from the old web.

  - Stop providing binary packages. They can be built from source. The storage
    problem is removed and with no activity there will hardly be any releases
    after all.

  - Don't know what to do with the tracker. It could be moved into the
    bitbucket issue tracker but I fear that will be much work and we will
    loose info. Maybe if can be dumped in some format for reference and new
    issues handled at bitbucket.


Disclaimer: If you feel that continuing your effort in some of these field is
what you want then that is of course fine.

Yours
-- 
%% Mats