[phc-general] Stepping down as maintainer

[Paul Biggar]

Hi folks,

There are a number of issues that have required my attention in phc
recently. I had intended to get to them, but I guess I should throw my
hands up and admit I probably won't have time again. I've enjoyed
working on phc, but since finishing my PhD I want to move on to other
topics, languages and projects, so I think its time to step down as
the maintainer of phc.

phc isnt dead, of course. This mailing list gets a few queries a
month, and I would ask list members to try to answer any question they
can. Most problems are related to configure and autotools, which are
generic skills that hopefully many people on the list have.

The code will remain up, waiting for others to take over or
contribute. While the code is in pretty good shape, there are a number
of outstanding tasks; the most important are:

- release a new version (easy)
- split phc into a number of libraries to make roadsend's job easier
(not hard if you are familiar with automake)
- finish code generation of objects (not hard, but will take time)
- fix the optimizer's bugs (hard, read Chapter 6 of my PhD thesis ;))

There are also quite a lot of bugs on the bug tracker, and a lot of
failing tests in the test suite. If anyone is interested in fixing
anything, I'll happily give you commit privileges until someone can
take over as maintainer. I can answer questions, but I don't have time
to diagnose problems and fix bugs.


A lot of phc's infrastructure is being adopted by rphp, the new
version of the Roadsend PHP compiler. People interested in chatting
about the phc code base should visit the #roadsend IRC room on
irc.freenode.net. I can answer questions there, and a couple of people
there are familiar with the phc codebase.


Best of luck, and thanks for using phc,
Paul


-- 
Paul Biggar
paul.biggar at gmail.com