The last public release of VM (8.1.1) was in April, 2010. So, we have
had more than a year pass by before the next release. And, it will take
almost another year before it makes it through the pipeline of the Linux
distributions. That means that the bug fixes that I have made won't be
available to the users at large for a long time.
If you look at the development tree at Launchpad
https://launchpad.net/vm
you will find that I have started out well, maintaining a release branch
for 8.1.x. I scheduled an 8.1.2 release for some time in June/July
2010, but it never happened. It is to hard for me to maintain multiple
branches, because all development gets its first stage of testing in my
daily use and I can't use multiple versions in daily use. The rest of
our development team and the alpha-testers are all focused on the trunk.
They regularly download trunk and use it in daily use. However, there
is nobody that uses the release branch, as far as I am aware.
We can fix this problem if one of you can volunteer to be a 'release
manager', who regularly uses the release branch, monitors the bug
reports that come in, and ports and tests the bug fixes on the release
branch. You don't need to be an expert elisp programmer to do this.
You just need to have some working knowledge of elisp and understand
code well enough to see what fixes fit and what don't.
Even though we have called VM a "community project" after Kyle Jones's
retirement, the community hasn't been particularly active. Rob F did
most of the work when he was active and then the burden fell on me.
Launchpad is a great tool that allows large teams to participate and
collaborate on maintaining software. I think we haven't been exploiting
it adequately. So, this is a chance for the "community" to get involved.
Cheers,
Uday
