GNATS plan

[Milan Zamazal]

This is the promised mail describing what I plan to do with GNATS in the
foreseeable future.

First one important information.  I took over the maintenance of GNATS,
but I can provide only a very limited maintenance of GnatsWeb and
TkGnats.  AFAIK Gerald Pfeifer was recently appointed as the GnatsWeb
maintainer, so we can cooperate, hopefully with a help of other GnatsWeb
developers, on that task.

As for TkGnats, it is threatened to become an orphaned software.  If you
like TkGnats, your chance to save the software is to adopt it.  If you
think you can't do a full maintenance of TkGnats but you can help with
non-trivial tasks, please tell me.  We can try to find some model of
cooperation regarding this thing.  Note that TkGnats hasn't been ported
to GNATS 4 yet and I'm not going to do it.

Now back to GNATS as a whole.

Priorities:

- The very first priority is to establish communication with the GNATS
  users again.  It is very frustrating for users to have the feeling
  their bug reports, patches, and suggestions are mostly ignored.

- The second short term goal is to get GNATS 4 released sometimes.  That
  means especially to make it more robust and to revise the manual.

How you can help right now:

- If you have any patches and/or bug reports sent to any GNATS mailing
  list, which were ignored in the last months, please send me them.
  I'll try to go through the open bug reports in BTS but I don't plan to
  investigate the mailing list archives.

- As you can see, English is not my native language.  Don't hesitate to
  notice me through private mails about any my English errors.  Since I
  plan the update of the documentation, the errors I do in mailing list
  messages etc. are likely to occur in the documentation sooner or
  later.

- Any other help is welcome, of course.

Infrastructure:

- I think the current infrastructure (mailing lists, CVS, ...) works so
  there is no need to move it elsewhere and I plan to keep it where it
  is now, i.e. mostly at Cygnus/RedHat.

- GNATS is a part of GNU so its GNU distribution sites and information
  places shouldn't be ignored.  That means I'll try to update the
  packages on ftp.gnu.org and the GNATS web page on www.gnu.org soon.

- I'd like to use a bug tracking database for a bug tracking system
  more. :-)  That means I'll try to track all bug reports, including
  those sent to bug-gnats@, in the GNATS on sources.redhat.com.

Human resources:

- My current experience with GNATS is that I have been maintaining its
  Debian package for about one and half year and that I wrote yet
  another Web interface to GNATS called gnats2w.  I can't say I'm
  familiar with the internals of the software and I must learn a lot of
  it.

- Resources I can spent on GNATS are limited.  GNATS is even not my
  primary free-time project.

- All that means I'm asking for some patience.  Some things I'll do can
  take a long (though finite!) time.

- If you're scared now that I can't maintain GNATS at all :-), don't be.
  I take the task seriously and though I can't do massive progress on it
  in a short time, I can do the necessary small steps regularly.  This
  should be a big change of the current state.

Milan Zamazal