[Announcement] Merlin becomes Metro.

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

Everyone,

Following various discussions with the Avalon PMC, select ASF members and 
others, the active developers of the Merlin source code together with a 
number of dedicated users have formulated a plan to escalate and expand the 
development of the Metro platform outside of ASF.

We have compiled a complete roadmap of what this means in practical terms to 
various user groups, available at;
    http://www.dpml.net/dpml/admin/pdfs/metro-roadmap-20041007.pdf

We hope that this document covers most aspects of the involved fork, even 
though it is not yet complete. For instance, the document doesn't yet explain 
exactly how this will take form.

 *  Digital Product Meta Library (dpml.net) is an existing resource hub of 
digital products. We have agreed to utilize this name and the resources 
available behind it, mainly ibiblio.org.

 *  Driven by our user focus here in Avalon, we are now pushing the "Open" in 
"OSS" to a concept that we call "Open Participation Software". Contributions 
and committer status are available to everyone.

 *  Organizational Lightweight, open process, open participation, ASL2.0, and 
lots of fun.


We are not fully up to speed (yet), but have the following resources 
available, which should be sufficient for most users at this point in time; 

  Mailing lists;
      List: admin-dpml@lists.dpml.net
      Description: Project management related stuff.
      Subscribe: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/admin-dpml

      List: dev-dpml@lists.dpml.net
      Description: Development related stuff.
      Subscribe: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/dev-dpml

      List: support-dpml@lists.dpml.net
      Description: Questions and general user support.
      Subscribe: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/support-dpml


  Web sites;
      www.dpml.net       Static content and static repository.
      paris.dpml.net     Dynamic content

  Subversion repository;
      http://paris.dpml.net/svn/metro

  Scarab Issuetracking
      http://paris.dpml.net/issues

(paris.dpml.net will become operational *soon*, as we are awaiting ibiblio.org 
admin's to add the host to the DNS and a new IP to be installed. Sorry for 
the inconvenience, and announcement of availability will be made on the 
admin-dpml@ mailing list.)


We would like to thank the entire ASF, members, committers and users for the 
time at the Apache Avalon project, for their valuable support and the 
experience we have gained. Perhaps Metro's and ASF's paths meet again in the 
future.


Cheers,

Niclas Hedhman
Stephen McConnell
Timothy Bennett
Andreas Oberhack
Cameron Fieber
Peter Neubauer
David Leangen
Mårten Österberg
Alexis Agahi
Raffael Herzog

Note:  ASF in the above context stands for The Apache Software Foundation.

P.S. If you have any problems with any of these resources, please contact 
niclas@hedhman.org and/or mcconnell@dpml.net


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