Going to reset maintainership/cease development for gtk-qt-engine, py-qt, py-kde, kbtv in a while. Who wants to take over?

[Danny Pansters]

Dear FreeBSD porters, hackers, users,


Due to changing circumstances in my life and the expectation that in the near 
future I won't be able to have enough time/energy to work on my ports, or 
even run FreeBSD on a desktop system that I can use frequently enough to stay 
in touch, I have decided that it would be wise to give up my maintainership 
and responsibilities for the ports I maintain, as well as the development and 
maintainership of kbtv. I'd rather do it now, while everything is in a 
up-to-date and working state, then at a time when things may have already 
gotten b0rken.

I'm currently maintaining the x11-themes/gtk-qt-engine port which has recently 
been updated and which can be taken over by someone else in a snap.

I'm also maintaining the interrelated combination of devel/py-sip, 
x11-toolkits/qscintilla, x11-toolkits/py-qt, and x11-toolkits/py-kde. I 
strongly advise anyone who wants to take over either of them to take all 
four. They belong together and have a common upstream. Please be advised that 
PyQt4 is already released upstream and once KDE4 is a fact of life there's 
going to be a bumpy ride to get everything upto current at that time, I 
expect. So be prepared for that (it's still too soon to roll in py-qt4 at 
this moment).

Finally, I maintain the port and am the author of multimedia/kbtv. I hope 
someone wants to continue its development and maintainership. It probably 
needs some more work with the saa driver and with the non-GUI modules to make 
it more general to work with different hardware (think: hooks to dbus/hal 
ultimately), currently bktr, saa, pwc. Also, come KDE4 it will need to adapt 
the GUI code to py-qt4/py-kde4. On the bright side, it now supports at least 
two different type of analog TV cards. No other *BSD app does. It's 
worthwhile to have end-user software that supports saa based cards, rather 
than only bktr (which is a horror). I'm willing to transfer/share copyright 
if that should be an issue. At the very least, parts of kbtv can be a nice 
starting point for a new app with perhaps a broader scope and perhaps a more 
skilled and less lazy developer.

Taking over would also mean, in time, hosting the tarball/website. But it's no 
problem keeping that where it is for a while. 

I'm planning to reset maintainership of the ports come October/November 2006 
but I hope that won't be needed. 

It has been a pleasure -- though sometimes one with headaches :) -- to work on 
improving the FreeBSD/KDE desktop experience, and I have learnt a lot (*) and 
hope my contributions have been useful. This is a hard decision but I have to 
make it sooner or later, and sooner is better.

(*) One good idea is to not have your first ever coding in C involve video 
capturing ;-)

Wishing all of you all the best,

Dan