Charlie Summers <charlie@lofcom.com> writes:
At 11:01 PM -0400 8/16/00, Philip Guenther is rumored to have typed:
The maintainer is not the leader. The job of maintainer is to express the concensus desire in a machine readable form.
Since you appear to be doing the bulk of the coding, you are indeed the "leader," whether you necessarily want to be or not. It was the _lack_ of leadership is what got us into this mess in the first place. (I am _not_ picking on Stephen here. The _only_ gripe I have with him is that he didn't secure the future of the code and the lists before he moved on; I remember the long period where _no one,_ including you, was really in charge of the code. I do _not_ fault him for moving on to other projects at all, I simply wish he would have spent 20-minutes or so properly closing things down and transfering those responsibilities necessary.)
This is where I see what happened as telling about the procmail & SmartList communities: who was there to take on maintainence of either of these packages? How many people at that point had submitted more than one patch or chunk of code to either procmail or SmartList? The list at the bottom the README file would seem to indicate that you could count those people on one hand, and that's still true today. To ensure stability, that number should probably be greater than 20, with at least a handfull (not one!) having write access to the source. It appears that the SmartList and procmail communities are too small, too content, too busy, or too inexperienced to _sustain_ Open Source development. Until those conditions disappear, procmail and SmartList will be in danger of becoming unmaintained. The status of the lists is just a reflection of this.
Anyway, I don't really care what software is used to run this list
Personally, I don't, either. But look at it from the newbie's perspective; "I want to install and use SmartList...but gee, the people who run the SmartList support list don't even trust it to operate their _own_ list!"
Exactly what does that say about SmartList to the newbie?
That the SmartList community is too small, too disinterested, too busy, or too powerless to change it. Guess what: it's *true*!
As for moving this list, I can tell you what it'll take:
Personally, I disagree completely. What it _should_ take is:
1) Someone volunteers, and is annointed by you to operate the list. (Consider this a volunteer, although there are others more capable than I to operate the list.)
2) Stephen transfers the dist lists he _should_ have passed on to someone who would properly maintain them a long time ago, and redirects the forwards. Or better, transfers the domain to you to be quit of it.
3) RWTH-Aachen.DE closes down the lists they don't want to run anyway...or don't, since these lists will rapidly become irrelevant anyway.
Much simpler than your method, which involves asking people for permission to do something they shouldn't be grantint permission for, anyway. Bottom line, RWTH-Aachen.DE doesn't have _any_ connection to SmartList or procmailn anymore, and shouldn't be operating the lists. Unless, of course, you _want_
Wrong: RWTH-Aachen does have a connection in the form of many, many copies of procmail and SmartList that tell people to send their questions to mailing-lists whose domain part is "rwth-aachen.de". That's why RWTH-Aachen has to be involved: otherwise a community that's too small already will be made even smaller.
them to; again, like it or not, you _are_ the one who should make these decisions. (It is impossible for committees to come to _any_ rapid agreements, and it's equally impossible for hundreds of mailing list subscribers to do so. And to think otherwise is foolish.) ...
Who said anything about the list subscribers deciding something together? I said the volunteer would ideally be _supported_ by the list, not that her or she should be selected by the list. The selection is done by the volunter himself or herself when they start looking at what the setup would require, whether they have the knowledge and time to do it, etc. When the volunteer makes the effort to have the lists transfered to their control, then it will be decided. Note that this could just as well be done by a group of people, but even then it must, in the end, be self-driven. Philip Guenther