[O] Changing the maintainer

[Carsten Dominik]

Hello everyone,

as Bastien has written in a related thread, the current idea
is that I will take over the maintainership of Org-mode
once more.  I have seen no objections so far, so I am assuming
that we should go ahead with this plan.

Let me start by extending my (and I am sure, everyones)
gratitude to Bastien.  I think he has done an incredible
job over the last two years, keeping Org-mode on course
and also supporting significant changes that we have seen
with the release of version 8.0.

Bastien's activity has been unmatched.  He has answered
a huge amount of questions in the mailing list, fixed an
uncounted number of bugs and he has been designing and applying
changes over the entire breadth of the Org code base.  This
is no easy feat and I really admire his work.  Besides this,
he has done amazing work keeping the community together and
making sure that the mailing list remains IMO one of the prime
places on the internet.

                 THANK YOU, Bastien.

I will leave the donations button on his name until the end of
April, so if you want to express your thanks to him in this
way, you have that possibility.  If not, writing to him and
expressing your amazement with his achievements in the
last two years will probably make him as happy.

One of the main things Bastien has done is to make space for
other developers, while making sure that the development
maintains a maximum of compatibility, usability and hackability.
It has taken a long time to get the new exporter into the
main stream, and I clearly think it was worth the wait.
We now have a complete set of exporters, immediately in the
first release that is based on the new parser and exporter
framework.  What Nicolas has achieved I still cannot fully
comprehend.  The exporter side of Org-mode was very usable,
but it was an unmaintainable mess, without clarity.  Now,
writing a new exporter has become extremely simple, everyone
can do it.  Due to the ingenious filter and inheritance
system, new exporters can be written with very little code.
Maintenance will be simple, since this is ONE parser,
one framework.

When I handed over the maintainership to Bastien two years
ago, I was worn down.  In the mean time, my life has not become
less full, and so this time around, I will make sure that the
project does not swallow me.  I hope very much that we as a
community can continue on the path Bastien has set, with a growing
number of people taking responsibility for specific parts of
Org.  I need to re-familiarize myself with many things, I am not
up to speed with some of the new developments, so I need to
study.  But when this is done, I will approach some of you and
ask for help, it would be great if some of you can say yes and
work with me.  I will see my own task mainly in removing
obstacles for everyone, and in coordinating releases.  I also
have coding ideas and plans, but those will have second priority.
I am really glad that Bastien has promised to stick around, and
he will still lead the round of fixes that usually follow
after a major release.

I am looking forward to again interact more with you all.

Cheers

- Carsten