Hi folks, I've heard back from Bertrand Garrigues, and he advised that I start the hand-off process for GNU maintainership of the groff package/project.
I have consequently contacted maintainers@gnu to initiate that process. Neither of us have a clear idea how long it will take, but he seemed confident that it wouldn't resemble an overnight procedure. Bertrand agreed that a 1/year cadence for groff releases sounded good, and said he'd be available to perform maintainer duties (mainly release management for 1.24.0 later this year) as long as they were (in my own wording) no more burdensome than those he had to handle for the groff 1.23.0 release. Bertrand's contributions of (1) migration to GNU Automake for our build system, (2) inclusion of gnulib as a C portability library, and (3) inauguration of an automated test suite for the code base have in my estimation delivered major benefits to the maintainability of groff; all were strongly forward-looking choices not necessarily easily appreciated directly by users. The test harness alone has ensured that many bugs and mistakes never landed in the Git repository in the first place. As a developer, I would have found groff much less approachable and far more frustrating had it not been for Bertrand's improvements. Bertrand has been quiet for a while but his positive impact on groff is unmistakable to a software engineer's eyes. I hope you will join me in thanking him for his excellent work. Regards, Branden
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