[Groff] Trying to understand groff development and release model

[Halim Issa]

All,

I've been searching the mailing list archives and wikis to try to understand 
why there has been no groff release for years, while during the same time what 
seems like a lot of useful commits have been done to the source code.

I am sure there are good reasons from the core developers to deviate from the 
"release early, release often" mantra of open source software, but since I 
have not been able to find it, I was hoping perhaps someone could kindly take 
the time to shed some light and a few sentences on the current development 
status, and what are the main reasons for not pushing some of the useful 
commits into a new release?

One of the key motivations for asking is the need for the various utf-8-
related patches in groff that seems to have been sitting in cvs for a while...

Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to shed some light on this!