INN maintenance and facing reality

[Russ Allbery]

The Doctor <doctor at doctor.nl2k.ab.ca> writes:

> As someone who has interest in NNTP, what will it take to be prime
> maintainer?

Mostly, doing what Julien has been doing lately.  :)  He's been doing a
great job.  There are a few tasks that go into being a maintainer:

* Follow news.software.nntp and the INN mailing lists and respond to bug
  reports and questions.  Everyone can easily do this.  Now that we have
  Trac, we also have somewhere to put the confirmed bug reports so that we
  don't lost track of them.

* Commit changes as they're ready, which requires doing some review and
  sanity checking and some testing.  The better test suite we manage to
  build, the easier the testing will be; currently, the test suite is only
  in its infancy.

* Decide when enough has accumulated and it's time to do a release.
  Publish a testing snapshot and then publish and announce a final
  release.  I can help with this as I have time.

* Ideally, tackle some of the large, long-term coding changes.  For
  example, the overview API transition is only just begun and needs quite
  a bit more work to produce what in the end will hopefully be much more
  maintainable code.  INN has a lot of global variables that should be
  removed.  Compliance with the latest RFCs (Julien has mostly taken care
  of this now).  That sort of thing.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.