Re: Offer for taking over maintainership

[Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com>]

For the sake of record, I will Footnote what Bastien wrote.  There will
be lots of Footnotes, not one or two.  But I wouldn't alter the article.

Bastien <bzg@altern.org> writes:

> Hi Jonathan,
>
> Jonathan Leech-Pepin <jonathan.leechpepin@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>  Either there's some
>> underlying reason for your apparent dislike for Bastien and his
>> approach to maintaining
>> Org, or some argument in the past that I am not aware of.
>
> For the sake of clarity (and history), here is how I understand why
> Jambunathan thinks I am not a good maintainer: he was frustrated with
> the way I handled the merge of the ODT export feature.
>
> The very first ODT exporter was based on two libraries: org-lparse.el
> and org-xhtml.el.  org-lparse.el implemented a new export engine that
> org-xhtml.el was using to produce HTML, and org-odt.el would build on
> top of both librairies.
>
> This approach was not satisfactory to me.  First, because I found
> org-lparse.el was ugly, mixing the wrong line-by-line approach for
> parsing an Org buffer, and the better "recursive" approach (have a
> look at org-lparse.el to get an idea of whether it is ugly.)  Second,
> because I thought having org-xhtml.el along org-html.el was confusing.
>
> Nicolas already started to work on his new exporter, encouraged by the
> first modest proof of concept I had for the recursive approach.
>
> I took the decision to delay the merge of the ODT exporter until it
> didn't rely on org-xhtml.el anymore, because I thought that relying
> on org-lparse.el for two export formats (HTML and ODT) was a wrong
> move, giving the wrong signal to Nicolas.
>
> When org-xhtml.el was not in the game anymore, and when I was
> confident Nicolas was deeply committed to the new exporter, I went
> with the merge.  I was happy!  I even received kudos from Jambunathan
> when I managed to solve possible copyright issues wrt merging .xml
> files into Emacs (there was a confusion on whether those files were
> copyrighted by OASIS and "mergeable" into Emacs.)
>
> Maybe Jambunathan thought all this was too slow, and based on stupid
> decisions.  He was on a sabbatical year at the time, and had plenty of
> time to work on the exporter and to put the pressure on me.  I was
> maintaining Org in my spare time, and tried to handle the pressure the
> way I could.
>
> I hope this is faithful to the facts -- all this is publicly available
> on this mailing list anyway!
>
>> Regardless, Bastien is doing a fine job from what I can see, he is
>> certainly actively assisting
>> users who post with questions or bugs, even when they occurred during
>> a time where he was
>> absent (with prior notice).  Perhaps he has not contributed to
>> certain aspects as others have,
>> however his presence and monitoring of the smaller aspects does allow
>> for further development
>> to proceed without being interrupted by every issue.
>
> Actually, one of the reasons I want to step down in the long run is
> that I'm a bit frustrated of not having time enough to focus on big
> new features.  But the flow of new users and new contributors is
> rewarding enough so that maintaining Org keeps being fun :)
>
> All best,

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