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xemacs.org Mailing Address Changes
Owner: ???
Effort: ???
Dependencies: ???
Abstract: ???
Personal addresses
-
Everyone who is contributing or has ever contributed code to
the XEmacs core, or to any of the packages archived at
xemacs.org, even if they don't actually have an account on any
machine at xemacs.org. In fact, all of these people should
have two mailing addresses at xemacs.org, one of which is
their actual login name (or potential login name if they were
ever to have an account), and the other one is in the form of
first name/last name, similar to the way things are done at
Sun. For example, Martin would have two addresses at
xemacs.org, martin@xemacs.org , and
martin.buchholz@xemacs.org , with the latter one
simply being an alias for the former. The idea is that in all
cases, if you simply know the name of any past or present
contributor to XEmacs, and you want to mail them, you will
know immediately how to do this without having to do any
complicated searching on the Web or in XEmacs
documentation.
-
Furthermore, I think that all of the email addresses mentioned
anywhere in the XEmacs source code or documentation should be
changed to be the corresponding ones at xemacs.org, instead of
any other email addresses that any contributors might
have.
-
All the places in the source code where a contributor's name
is mentioned, but no email addressed is attached, should be
found, and the correct xemacs.org address should be
attached.
-
The alias file mapping people's addresses at xemacs.org to
their actual addresses elsewhere (in the case, as will be true
for the majority of addresses, where the contributor does not
actually have an account at xemacs.org, but simply a
forwarding pointer), should be viewable on the xemacs.org web
site through a CGI script that reads the alias file and turns
it into an HTML table.
Package addresses
I also think that for every package archived at xemacs.org, there
should be three corresponding email addresses at xemacs.org. For
example, consider a package such as lazy-shot . The
addresses associated with this package would be:
-
lazy-shot@xemacs.org . - This is a discussion
mailing list about the
lazy-shot package, and it
should be controlled by Majordomo in the standard fashion.
-
lazy-shot-patches@xemacs.org .
- This is where
patches to the
lazy-shot package are set. This
should go to various people who are interested in such patches.
For example, the maintainer of lazy-shot , perhaps
the maintainer of XEmacs itself, and probably to other people
who have volunteered to do code review for this package, or for
a larger group of packages that this package is in. Perhaps
this list should also be maintained by Majordomo.
-
lazy-shot-maintainer@xemacs.org .
- This address is
for mailing the maintainer directly. It is possible that this
will go to more than one person. This would particularly be the
case, for example, if the maintainer is dormant or does not
appear very responsive to patches. In this case, the address
would also point to someone like Steve, who is acting in the
maintainer's stead, and who will himself apply patches or make
other changes to the package as maintained in the CVS archive on
xemacs.org.
It may take a bit of work to track down the current addresses for
the various package maintainers, and may in general seem like a
lot of work to set up all of these mail addresses, but I think
it's very important to make it as easy as possible for random
XEmacs users to be able to submit patches and report bugs in an
orderly fashion. The general idea that I'm striving for is to
create as much momentum as possible in the XEmacs development
community, and I think having the system of mail addresses set up
will make it much easier for this momentum to be built up and to
remain.
Ben Wing
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