Re: Guinea Pigs

On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 06:59:17PM -0800, John Fruetel wrote:
> Not sure about the versioning;  I marked the latest ones as version 7.11.
> If I don't get any more bug reports, I'll probably put out a final version
> marked as 7.11a or something.

As the current gotmail maintainer, I realized some time ago I didn't
have enough time anymore to decently maintain the software. I've seen
the contributions by John and others during the latest crisis, and I've
made some offers to turn the project over, or add people as
co-maintainers on Savannah.

I haven't had any response yet; I'm not sure if the mail was lost, or
what, but I'm going to ask publicly this time.

If anyone feels like they have a good grasp of gotmail's functionality
and are willing to spend time hacking on it when Hotmail breaks, please
mail me. If I can see that you've made some significant contributions in
the past, I'll add you as a full maintainer for Gotmail.

A little history- Peter Hawkins wrote Gotmail in 2000. He made his last
release in 2001. More hotmail breakage occurred, and as I needed Gotmail
at the time, I spent the time to fix everything and package it for
Debian. I sent the fixes to Peter for a while, but he didn't have the
time to make any new releases. I kept things up-to-date in the Debian
revisions I was releasing.

Finally Peter offered to turn the project over to me in early 2002. I
made a website for it and released 0.7.0. Eventually I moved the project
onto Savannah to better coordinate all the great help I was receiving
from the community. Peter retains copyright on Gotmail.

Now that I've been the maintainer for two years, I'm finding I also
don't have the time or the inclination to continue giving proper
attention to this project. It's the right time to turn it over to
someone else. I will still be available for guidance and to do the
Debian packaging, and I'll still work on the 'gotfemail' rewrite when I
have time.

> If/when Savannah comes back, this should get posted up there.  Of course,
> someone named 'Michael Wright' posted a fixed version of gotmail just before
> Savannah got hacked.

Before they realized they got hacked, yes. I doubt that he was able to
test as many configurations as John has through all the list input, so I
imagine John's version will emerge as 0.7.11 (or 0.8.0). That may depend
on the new maintainer, if John declines the role.

-- 
.------------------------------------------------------------.
| paul cannon                                 [email protected] |
| gotmail maintainer          http://people.debian.org/~pik/ |