New project leader needed for GNU Sather

[Norbert Nemec]

Hi there,

First a few words about Sather: As a object oriented language, Sather can best 
be compare to Eiffel - actually, early development was even started out as an 
improvement version of Eiffel before various fundamental design changes moved 
it away from there significantly. Of course there is no objective, absolute 
measure for the quality of a programming language, but Sather definitely is a 
fascinating language powerful enough to catch many of those who ever get 
involved with it...

After ~2 years of working for the GNU Sather project, I have finally decided, 
now, to officially lay down my job as GNU maintainer, due to my general lack of 
time, and, on top of it, Julia, the most wonderful, admirable girl on this 
world 
stepping into my life.

Already, over the last year or so, I didn't spend nearly as much work on Sather 
as I would have liked to or as it would have been necessary to keep the project 
in shape. Sorry to all those I might have turned down or who had to fight their 
way through the outdated GNU Sather site.

Right now, most development is done by a group at the University of Waikato, 
New Zealand, led by Keith Hopper. Those guys have been very active over the 
past years, designing and writing a completely new library which is now nearly
stable, and they intend to continue their work, eager to start out on a 
completely new, extensible, high-performace compiler for the language.

Now, that the new library is near to be finished, the project would finally be 
ready to take on contributions of all kinds. (Additional library modules, help
in designing the new compiler, etc.) Anyhow, Keith&Co do have neither the 
resources nor the experience to lead an open-source project or to coordinate 
the work among a larger number of developers. Therefore, I'm officially asking 
for any volunteers as leader for this GNU project.

This whole task is less about actual development work, but more about PR-stuff 
and coordination of work. The site is basically set up, although very outdated, 
everything else would need to be set up now. GNU will provide all the resources 
necessary for open development (version-management, mailing-lists, 
bug-tracking, 
etc.) - of course, once all of that is set up there is any amount of coding and
design work to do as well...

The project is extremely promising, a number of developers is already standing 
by to step in as soon as their contributions are welcome. After my experience 
over the last two years, the attraction of the language itself is big enough to 
gather many more developers within a short time with just a little bit of PR.

Anyone interested in the project itself, take a look at: 

    http://www.gnu.org/software/sather
    
(As I said, it is a little outdated, but still a good start.)

Public discussion takes place at the newsgroup 'comp.lang.sather'. There is a 
mailing list set up: <address@hidden> as well. A one-way message link is 
set up feeding all mails to the newgroup. Unfortunately, the other way never 
worked for a long time before it broke down again... Important messages should 
therefore be sent to the list in order to reach everybody.

For further questions, you can, of course, also contact me directly.

Ciao,
Nobbi

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