ANNOUNCE: Welcome Denis Barbier, the new WML maintainer!

["Ralf S. Engelschall" <nospam@thanx>]

Over the last 6 months the WML development and maintainance slowed down
dramatically because other Apache-related projects (e.g. mod_ssl and my Apache
book) where I'm involved (as one of the Apache developers) demanded too much
of my time.  Because it was clear to me that my situation will not change even
in the next 6 months, I'm already asked for a hacker who wants to maintain
WML. 

And I've received a few offers, of course. But every time the person wanted to
do only a single release or wanted to act as the maintainer for a few days or
one or two weeks only. That's too less to be useful for the WML community
and especially to preserve the future of WML, of course. So I had to wait.
Nevertheless thanks to all people who made an offer.

But finally a bright and energized hacker showed it's interest and so I'm
today highly pleased to announce him as the new official WML maintainer:

   Denis Barbier 
   barbier@imacs.polytechnique.fr

Denis already contributed a lot to WML and especially to the forthcoming WML
1.6.8 version. And Denis additionally shares the intentions about cleaness and
nifty things with me, so I know that he is the right man for the WML
maintainer task and so he receives all my personal support and trust. Please
work with Denis as nice as you played with me in the past, please. He will try
hard to preserve the future of WML, but for this he needs _YOUR_ support. So
please be friendly and supportive to him.

What impact has this maintainer change? No bad impact, of course.  All names,
addresses and locations will remain. For instance the WML webarea will be
still http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/, the support mailing list will be
still sw-wml@engelschall.com, the distribution will be still named
wml-1.X.Y.tar.gz, etc. Because Denis has full access to all these resources on
my machines and will maintain it directly at those locations for you.

Now to the new things:

1. We've moved the WML source tree into a CVS repository.
   When you want you can now always be up-to-date with the
   lastest changes by using the Anoynmous RSYNC service:
   $ rsync http://sw.engelschall.com/wml-cvs/ /local/path/to/wml/cvs/

2. We've unbundled the http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/ area
   from the mother area http://www.engelschall.com/sw/. Optically nothing
   changed, but this way Denis now can control the whole website on his own.
   Additionally a few goodies are now available: For instance the
   http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/distrib/wml-SNAP/ area now contains
   always the latest snapshot. The delay is just 6 hours, i.e. when Denis
   fixes a bug for you, you can immediately find the fixed files there.  And
   under http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/distrib/ a tarball
   wml-SNAP-YYMMDDHHMM.tar.gz is rolled every six hours which can be used to
   easily fetch the whole snapshot.

3. The next release will be WML 1.6.8 and already contains
   a lot of fixes from Denis. This is the last WML version I've managed.  The
   forthcoming versions start at version number 1.7.0 and will be entirely
   managed by Denis on his own. In case of conceptional problems and major
   design decisions and similar things I'll be still available to the
   community.  Especially to Denis, of course. And I'll from time to time also
   contribute fixes and enhancements to WML, of course. But the main authoring
   and maintaining task is now overtaken by Denis. 

So, now please give Denis a friendly welcome, friends! Thanks.

Greetings,
                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       rse@engelschall.com
                                       www.engelschall.com
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