[gnutls-dev] Re: new gnutls maintainer

[Simon Josefsson]

Hello everyone.

As a first step of the maintainer handover, I'll be rolling a release
to make sure all steps of the release process is working for me.

I've created 1.0.18rc1, which is essentially the same as 0.0.17,
except some autoconf/automake version differences (use 'diff' to see
the details):

http://josefsson.org/gnutls/releases/

The release has been signed by my key 0xB565716F, which I guess will
be used for my future GnuTLS releases as well (unless Niko's send me
his private key...).

If nobody objects to the rc1 above, I'll release it as 1.0.18 on
August 5.

Perhaps I should explain what I perceive that my role will mean for
gnutls, to avoid false expectations.

First, I won't be doing major coding.

My only initial goal is to make GnuTLS portable, probably by
incorporating compatibility files from the gnulib project
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/>, and by testing GnuTLS on many
platforms using my Autobuild framework
<http://josefsson.org/autobuild/>.  A self test suite is probably
required to achieve this goal.

I may be looking into making it simpler to replace the cryptographic
library (currently only Libgcrypt) with other libraries (Nettle,
LibTomCrypt, ...), but also with hardware.

I might work on making the manual accessible on more formats, possibly
by switching to Texinfo, or using GTK-DOC and Doxygen.

I'm counting on users to submit patches.  And I'm hoping Nikos will be
around to help review them, and perhaps even write most of them. :)
I'll try to write down feature requests or general suggestions in the
doc/TODO file.

I'm sure Nikos' excellent work on GnuTLS maintenance will be missed,
but with everyone's help, I hope to at least make up some of it.

Regards,
Simon