[zeromq-dev] Leaving my role as maintainer

[Martin Lucina]

ph at imatix.com said:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Martin Lucina <mato at kotelna.sk> wrote:
> 
> > due to lack of funding or any significant revenue that would offset the
> > costs I can no longer justify spending time as maintainer of the build
> > system or native API reference manual.
> 
> This is a loss to the 0MQ community. I'm sure everyone will agree that
> you've always made impeccably accurate contributions.
> 
> Good luck with whatever projects you work on.

Thanks. I do hope to work with 0MQ in future, but the things I'm doing
right now are pretty unrelated :-(

> > The build system is in the good hands of Mikko Koppanen; as for the API
> > reference, it would be great if someone from the user community would step
> > up to work with Martin Sustrik on reviewing and improving that
> > documentation. As the canonical documentation of the API it's a critical
> > part of the project and I'm sure that Martin would appreciate the help.
> 
> I'm happy to help with editing and review. However it'd be most fun to
> open this to the community and suggest that it's time for any 0MQ user
> who feels they are good technical writers to consider sending patches
> for the man pages. Note that documentation for 2.1 and 3.0 overlaps in
> most areas but you do need to target the two versions separately.

The manual has always been open to contributions and the occasional patch
has turned up. A couple of people did offer to help but that never
transpired into actual contributions.

I think the lack of contributions is more about good technical writing
being hard work than any other factors. Also, writing a reference manual is
a different kind of effort/less fun than e.g. what you're doing with The
Guide; at least the way I tried to do things was to refrain from prose and
opinions as much as possible and stick to spec-like facts. I got this from
the POSIX manuals; very dry but accurate and to the point which is IMO what
you want from a reference.

Just my 2c.

> > I will continue to maintain the  Debian package for 2.1.x for the time
> > being since that does not take up too much time. Martin/Pieter, note that
> > this is really independent of the Debian packaging that is currently in the
> > debian/ directory in Git, this is now quite out of date and should probably
> > be removed or at least replaced with what is being used in the official
> > package.
> 
> Would you send a patch to update that?

Not sure what you mean by "update". As it stands that packaging is
maintained externally as part of the official Debian package.

What would need to be done is replace the current stuff in Git with the
official packaging, but modified slightly to be usable for a "build me a
snapshot package of this particular Git checkout" type workflow. Is that
what you want? Will anyone actually use this?

Then there's the option of actually distributing DEBs from zeromq.org, but
I don't really want to get into that ...

-mato