On Sep 30, 2008, at 9:18 AM, James Berry wrote: > We have asked Jordan Hubbard, the father of MacPorts, to join us on > the Elder Council, and he has given his tentative acceptance.
First, let me thank James, Markus and Juan for having both the insight and the courage to recognize their own life-induced limitations and put the project ahead of any personal attachments they may feel. That is a less common virtue than one might think, so I raise my hat to them for taking this step and for the degree of thought and care they so clearly put into this message! Second, I do fervently hope that their "call for volunteers" is not met with the sound of crickets chirping because this project really does need leadership to get to the next phase of its development - milestones like binary packages [available from macports.org], regular builds and associated regression testing, and further improvements to some of the more advanced technologies (at least by comparison to the make-based ports collections we're all familiar with) which underlie MacPorts. There is still a lot of untapped potential in the current design, and the next generation of leadership for MacPorts will have a lot to do with how much energy and focus is applied to these sorts of challenges, so if you're one of the regular faces we see around here (or even someone who's not so regular, but would like to be and sincerely feels they have the time and energy required), please, step up! Finally, I'd like to correct one small misperception, as flattering as it is, which is that I'm the "Father" of MacPorts. Landon Fuller really deserves that distinction, if any single individual does, and I think it's more accurate to refer to me as the "Godfather" of MacPorts since I got the project initially created and funded, and you can see my fingerprints here and there in the design (usually as a result of cornering Landon in his office and waving my arms until he gave in on some point), but Landon is the guy who put all the pieces together and actually coded version 1.0. From that point forward, we also owe a debt of gratitude to a number of non-Apple people (and they know who they are) for taking things much, much further and making sure that the baby we left on the community's doorstep did not subsequently die from exposure and neglect [OK, that's a HORRIBLE analogy, but I'm known for those, so I'll just leave it at that]. Thank you portmgr, and thank you macports volunteers! We at Apple will, in turn, continue to contribute where we can by keeping the infrastructure up and running, but it's really up to the community (that's you) at this point, so I really hope people will step into these rather large shoes and make the most of the opportunity to further organize and promote the wealth of open source offerings for Mac OS X! - Jordan _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users