Subject: faces: looking for a new organiser.

From: richb@stard (Rich Burridge)
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1993 10:26:24 -0800

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week.

What with the recent announcement by Sun (and five other companies),
the RealWork(TM) workload in my group has become tremendous. Just when
I thought I was going to have spare time in order to turn out a new
version of faces, I now find that this has all changed. I fully realise
I will no longer have time to do this.

Of the five mailing lists I contain for some of my various programs,
faces is the most active, and has the most interesting potential. In
order to exploit that potential, and to start people producing some
innovating uses for it, it needs new management.

So I'm looking for somebody to do this. Things that need doing include:

* Applying all the outstanding bug fixes that people have sent me.

* Making sure the new version works on all the latest O/S's. People on
  this list can help here.

* Packaging this up. This should be fairly easy. It just means adjusting
  various files in the generic distribution (Makefile.dist, MANIFEST, README,
  etc...)

* Looking after the mailing list. Adding/deleting names and looking after
  the mailing list archive. Actually this could be a separate function done
  by somebody else.

* Doing the three way split (as mentioned in a previous mail), and making a
  prototype available. This is where it could get very interesting. With
  this split, and the ability to write lots of new scripts/programs to
  generate the list of icons to display, then faces could be used for lots
  of new things. I was seriously considering redesigning the OpenWindows
  DeskSet file manager along these lines.

  When the split has been done, and it's nicely working, then this new version
  would need to be packaged up, and distributed.

The faces mailing list currently has 71 names on it of which four of those
are expander aliases. I'd really like to see it developed further but I do
realise that I don't have the time to do it.

Volunteers?