Getting things moving again

[Eric S. Raymond]

Apologies to all for having been rather invisible recently.  What
happened was I got an emergency call for help from a project we rely on -
GNUPLOT. (Perhaps not everyone knows this is the graphics engine we use
in ntpviz, which is one of our sexier new features.)

It seems that SourceForge, where GNUPLOT is hosted, is soon to shut
down CVS service (I don't remember the drop-dead date but I think it's
in November).  The GNUPLOT guys decided they needed a git conversion
*immediately*, and they did, and I was the logical person to turn to.

Which would have been no big deal except that CVS conversions are
horrible time- and attention-sinks. This one was only moderately
nasty as such things go, but that was enough to eat my bandwidth
for two weeks.  Anyway, happy ending - GNUPLOT will not die and
ntpviz still has a back end.

We have some loose ends from 1.0 to clean up.  I took care of a few
of them today; unpeer needed to be upgunned so it can take a type/unit
pair rather than a magic IP address, and there was a pending dead-code
removal. I've also removed some obsolete to-dos.

Here's what I see as the top of the near-term agenda:

* Fred and Gary need to have, and resolve, their argument about what to
  do to the build recipe around Python library installation.  For
  concreteness, this should probably start with a proposed patch from
  Fred.

* There are couple of Mac-support merge requests pending from
  Fred. Whether to take them is not a technical question but a
  policy one, how hardnosed we're going to be abour our C99/POSIX
  baseline.  In view of our adoption strategy, are older versions
  if Mac OS X important enough to make an exception?  Discuss;
  once the pros and cons have been laid out we'll want a ukase
  from Mark.

* I would like us to plan on a short-cycle 1.1, to land early January,
  with SNMP support as the big new feature. Ian: is this a realistic
  timeframe?  Is there any support you're not getting that you'll need
  to get this done.

Senior devs: please chime in with any goals you think we ought to
pursue for 1.1.

I've got a really big one that's not going to get done in one release
cycle, but which I consider worth some thought beginning now.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can
bribe the people with their own money.
	-- Alexis de Tocqueville