Maintainership of XEmacs packages bbdb and vm

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Pruning xemacs-review, no policy issues here.

Robert Widhopf-Fenk writes:

 > But I also cannot recall getting any emails regarding
 > problems with the XEmacs packages, but I must admit that I
 > do not read xemacs newsgroups or mailing lists it is just
 > too much noise.

I don't know if they were sent to you directly or not.  We do ask that
users use `vm-submit-bug-report' but we can't enforce it.

 > Are there any issue/bug trackers for packages, e.g. like Debian?

Not yet.  I'm working on that, but I don't think it will solve all of
these problems.  I thought about just piping xemacs-beta to the ITS,
but that's not appropriate.  (I happened to have a few thousand posts
from emacs-devel handy, and did that.  What a useless pile of junk
resulted!  xemacs-beta would not be so bad, less traffic, but no, I'm
not gonna go there!)

So bottom line is that bug reports will have to be filtered by hand.

Your suggestions on what makes life easiest for you would be greatly
appreciated.  Anything we can automate we will.

Definitely you are welcome to recommend that users report to the
XEmacs ITS when it goes live.  But please consult with us (especially
me) first.  It will take special programming (not difficult, but not
done yet) to send VM bug reports to the VM module in ITS.

 > But certainly I should be blamed for not updating the xemacs
 > package of VM while releasing bugfix releases. ;-/

Not at all; you're a volunteer, and the XEmacs package system has its
deficiencies for third party maintainers.  It should be fun for you,
and I have to admit that it isn't always.

 > Yes I would like to continue to maintain them, as I am also
 > still actively using and developing on XEmacs.

Great!

 > I believe I should have subscribed to some mailing list,
 > which are the important ones?  Maybe I could setup an
 > procmail rule to keep the traffic low and related to VM
 > and BBDB...

xemacs-beta at xemacs.org is the one where all the bug reports eventually
go.  I'll also make you a busybody (permanently subscribed) to reports
from the ITS for VM.  Users may post to comp.emacs.xemacs, but
normally for a true bug they are redirected to vm-bugs.

But another possibility would be to ask an active XEmacs/VM user to
keep tabs on VM reports (there aren't many), and feed them to you
and/or the ITS.  Aidan Kehoe <kehoea at parhasard.net> and Uwe Brauer
<uwe.brauer at xemacs.org> come to mind.

 > Sure Aidan should also be allowed to commit, I have merged
 > changes of him more than once ;-)

OK.  Be aware that this may make merging harder for you.  If you
notice any problems, get in touch with Aidan (or other committers) and
make arrangements to make the workflow better for you.

 > Well, I do not care to much about political issues, the bugs
 > should be fixed ...

OK.  Be aware that although some maintainers just want control of
their packages, others have reported that having third parties
committing at will interferes with their workflow.  If you find that
happening, tell people right away; they'll sympathize.