Hamilton, I do agree. Please start a thread and make some suggestion. Arch has been discussed and I think there is widespread knowledge in the community about it, so this might be a good idea to actively put resources into switching starting with the 5.2 release (meaning, 5.2 release will be released on arch or whatever else we decide).
As for the merge, Jeff Davis has the experience on how to do this, but he had done the last merges already so it would be great if someone else could step up and do the merge, asking Jeff for a "howto". Sadly I don't have the time at the moment. And this is only true for *core* packages.
As for development on 5.1, well. In a way I'd say that 5.1 was closed and it was made known that 5.1 is closed and noone should develop on it. If people are still committing on 5.1 it is their responsibility to commit this on 5.2 as well or see their functionality gone in 5.2. I know that it might be frustrating not to have all functionality available in the current release *BUT*:
- Microsoft Release every I don't know when, so people should be aware of that and stay patient.
- It is possible to use packages from a different branch (we have a mixed 5.1/ 5.2 / HEAD / Custom CVS environment).
I don't think package maintainers will help, though I agree it makes a lot of sense. But would you stop distributing forums just because it does not have a maintainer?
Last but not least, in my opinion it does not make sense to talk of .LRN and OpenACS as seperate when it comes down to code. .LRN are just more packages, so we could in theory at least release both at the same time. It is just a matter of effort and I think communication.
