[info-gnuastro] Appologies for late first release

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear info-gnuastro mailing list,

I want to sincerely apologize for not being able to release Gnuastro 
yet. Unfortunately its release has become intertwined with my PhD thesis 
and graduation. So I had to temporarily halt my Gnuastro activities in 
the last few months to be able to graduate. Hopefully as soon as my 
thesis is submitted I will be able to prepare the first release.

The main issue is not the technicalities of releasing Gnuastro, but that 
I don't want to disappoint users/developers by not being able to answer 
and apply the comments/suggestions and possible bugs you will definitely 
find or solve any issues that you will probably have in developing 
within it. Since this will be the first release, the transition to a 
fully collaborative development in Gnuastro (that I hope to achieve 
soon) will take a lot of time and energy on my behalf after the first 
release. So I am very grateful for your understanding in this very busy 
(and stressful) time for me.

After a year or two of its first release that Gnuastro has become more 
mature and the development is fully done by the community, then the 
official maintainer will be elected by the active developers in a 
biannual period (period is open to discussion). So I am really looking 
forward for Gnuastro to be a community project lead by the general 
astronomical community (but independent of any particular astronomical 
institute, project or instrument), so astronomers in all institutes, 
projects and instruments can use its low-level tools in their 
higher-level instrument-dependent pipelines. This will help in the 
progress of our astronomical knowledge by decreasing the burden on the 
developers of each project or pipeline, since they won't have to 
re-write the basic functions that other projects also use but are too 
customized for those projects to allow others to benefit.

But not all Gnuastro activities have to be halted until its first 
release. I have released the manual for this purpose:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/

If you have a look at it, you will get a good understanding of nearly 
everything about Gnuastro and all its capabilities (as a design 
principle, nothing is implemented in Gnuastro before it has been fully 
documented first). Since the manual is very comprehensive, and time 
consuming to read, this period until its first release might also be a 
good chance for you to go through the manual. You will definitely have 
various suggestions/criticisms or ideas during the reading of the 
manual. In that case, please use the following instructions in the 
manual to let the rest of the users know so we can plan for applying 
your suggestions:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Report-a-bug.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Suggest-new-feature.html

We have already prepared a long list of tasks (new features) and found 
some bugs, which you can see here:

https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?group=gnuastro
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnuastro

I am sure that you will find lots of new tasks to add to Gnuastro so 
please inform us so we can document them and start thinking about how to 
implement them. In this way, as soon as it is released, you can be in 
charge of implementing the tasks you have defined.

In a subsequent mail I will be informing you about one particular issue 
we could really use your ideas and experience with, or the licensing the 
libraries of Gnuastro, this is an important issue which is best 
addressed at this pre-release stage.

I am really looking forward to finish my thesis work and be able to 
release Gnuastro as soon as possible. So I would most humbly like to 
apologize again for not being able to deliver Gnuastro to you yet, and 
ask for your patience in this busy time for me.

Thank you for your understanding,
Mohammad