[Espeak-general] Taking ownership of the espeak project and its future

[Valdis V. <val...@od...>]

Hello, espeak community!

Probably you, similarly to me, feel that Jonathan Duddington seems to
have left this project.

I tried to find any more information about Jonathan, in the net without
big success.

Today I send conventional paper mail to address, shown in 
http://www.strongarm.org.uk/risc/info/tictactoe/helptext.htm 
to get more info about him, but it is not impossible, that he has leaved not only
this project, but our world.

(I'd be delighted to be wrong, but look at:
http://www.192.com/atoz/people/duddington/jonathan/cv4/2588567896/ ) 

I did send some private mails to few other project's contributors, but
didn't get response/much excitement about taking ownership themselves.
So I decided I'm not the worst one and will take over development of this project
(at least, for some time).

In my everyday life I work mostly with high level languages (Java,
Groovy, Bash, Velocity), therefore I have very weak understanding of
espeak internalities (yet). Therefore I cannot grant (and I don't seem
it is necessary) any architectural changes. And therefore I strongly
encourage any with necessary skills and will to participate in further
development of this project.

As sourceforge policy do not allow to get owner access to the project without
current owner's permissions, I suspect our community will have to
gradually move away from this site.

I have already created new github site for espeak:
https://github.com/espeak/espeak/

It supports wiki pages (I'll put
documentation there) and simple issue management. It also supports
better browsing of source code for everybody and better collaboration
between (technically savvy) developers. I strongly suggest these who
can, clone this project and submit contributions either as pull
requests or (at least) as git diffs.

Question is, what to do with current SF forum and mailing list? I have
respond recently to some of open issues in forum, but I encourage to
submit new issues on github: https://github.com/espeak/espeak/issues

My proposal is following:

1. Move development to github, check that it builds correctly on
different platforms. (today I recreated this project with imported
history from SVN).

2. Copy and update documents from sourceforge site to the github wiki.

3. Release first (development?) release with
announcement in free software/open source world about espeak
development changes.

Further development priorities:

1. Accept github pull requests and/or git diffs from other
co-developers/contributors.

2. Accept suggestions, contributions from testers/contributors about
language resource files.

3. Infrastructure modernization, when/if necessary skills are gathered.
Any more thoughts?

Please look at this as new possibility to get implemented your
ideas/changes in this project!

And if you are brave, you can overtake my position (I still look at my
position as a temporary deputy :-D)!

Sincerely,
Valdis Vitolins