xemacs.org Mailing Address Changes

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Personal addresses

Everyone who is contributing or has ever contributed code to the XEmacs core, or to any of the packages archived at xemacs.org, even if they don't actually have an account on any machine at xemacs.org. In fact, all of these people should have two mailing addresses at xemacs.org, one of which is their actual login name (or potential login name if they were ever to have an account), and the other one is in the form of first name/last name, similar to the way things are done at Sun. For example, Martin would have two addresses at xemacs.org, martin@xemacs.org, and martin.buchholz@xemacs.org, with the latter one simply being an alias for the former. The idea is that in all cases, if you simply know the name of any past or present contributor to XEmacs, and you want to mail them, you will know immediately how to do this without having to do any complicated searching on the Web or in XEmacs documentation.
Furthermore, I think that all of the email addresses mentioned anywhere in the XEmacs source code or documentation should be changed to be the corresponding ones at xemacs.org, instead of any other email addresses that any contributors might have.
All the places in the source code where a contributor's name is mentioned, but no email addressed is attached, should be found, and the correct xemacs.org address should be attached.
The alias file mapping people's addresses at xemacs.org to their actual addresses elsewhere (in the case, as will be true for the majority of addresses, where the contributor does not actually have an account at xemacs.org, but simply a forwarding pointer), should be viewable on the xemacs.org web site through a CGI script that reads the alias file and turns it into an HTML table.

Package addresses

I also think that for every package archived at xemacs.org, there should be three corresponding email addresses at xemacs.org. For example, consider a package such as lazy-shot. The addresses associated with this package would be:

lazy-shot@xemacs.org.: This is a discussion mailing list about the lazy-shot package, and it should be controlled by Majordomo in the standard fashion.
lazy-shot-patches@xemacs.org.: This is where patches to the lazy-shot package are set. This should go to various people who are interested in such patches. For example, the maintainer of lazy-shot, perhaps the maintainer of XEmacs itself, and probably to other people who have volunteered to do code review for this package, or for a larger group of packages that this package is in. Perhaps this list should also be maintained by Majordomo.
lazy-shot-maintainer@xemacs.org.: This address is for mailing the maintainer directly. It is possible that this will go to more than one person. This would particularly be the case, for example, if the maintainer is dormant or does not appear very responsive to patches. In this case, the address would also point to someone like Steve, who is acting in the maintainer's stead, and who will himself apply patches or make other changes to the package as maintained in the CVS archive on xemacs.org.

It may take a bit of work to track down the current addresses for the various package maintainers, and may in general seem like a lot of work to set up all of these mail addresses, but I think it's very important to make it as easy as possible for random XEmacs users to be able to submit patches and report bugs in an orderly fashion. The general idea that I'm striving for is to create as much momentum as possible in the XEmacs development community, and I think having the system of mail addresses set up will make it much easier for this momentum to be built up and to remain.

Ben Wing

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