[development] Absence - Baby

[Dries Buytaert]

Hello all,

as you know, Karlijn and I are expecting our first baby.  Karlijn is
due in 2 weeks, but chances are the baby might arrive a little sooner
than that.  It might as well arrive a little later, although at this
point, we think it will arrive sooner that late. But who knows, you
can't really plan these things. ;)

I'll try to stick around as long as I can, but as soon the baby is
born, I'm going to take a break from everything Drupal. I'd like to
focus my energy on helping Karlijn, and I'd like to spend as much time
with Karlijn and the baby as possible.   I don't know what life will
be shortly after our son or daughter is born, but time permitting, I
might actually be around to help and to get some Drupal work done.
Just don't count on that and expect me to disappear for a while.
Either way, I expect to resume my normal duties two or three weeks
after the baby is born.

It would be great if you guys could take a lead in getting Drupal 6
out during my absence.  You'll have to. There is a lot of work to be
done, and once we ironed out most of the pressing bugs, we'll want to
involve the (non-developer) Drupal community some more and target a
first beta release.

Try to post an occasional status update on drupal.org, and maybe
target August 1st or August 15th as candidate dates for a first beta
release of Drupal 6?  Of course, Steven and Gabor should be here to
help.  It would be great to see you guys make a ton of progress when
watching from the sideline for a while. :)

The next couple of months, I'll also be on the look out for a Drupal 7
branch maintainer.  I'll share my thoughts around that when we're a
little bit closer to opening the new developer branch, but I figured
I'd let you know that I'm keeping an eye on your contributions, the
quality of your work, and your vision for Drupal.  We'll have plenty
of time to talk about this more, but showing off your talents during
the code freeze helps as a maintaining a branch, and dealing with bug
reports will be a significant part of any branch maintainer's job.  In
other words: you'll want to start impressing me now. :-)

PS: which reminds me -- I still have to create the obligatory baby website.

-- 
Dries Buytaert :: http://buytaert.net/