Greetings.
	A few weeks ago, after some prompting from Ken Raeburn, I discussed
with Jon Kamens the prospect of maintaining GNUemacs for Athena. He suggested
that I contact you with further details on what I had in mind and what I was
willing to do.
	I propose to "maintain" emacs for Athena. By maintain, I mean dealing
with following upgrades (particularly, upgrading from 18.54 to 18.55) and
applying particular fixes and forwarding local fixes on to the FSF. I've
scanned the bug notes file for emacs bugs, and found 54 pending items, of
various categories. While several of them are difficult to duplicate, and
others are just hard to debug, a larger number of them have been fixed, and
even audited, but haven't been applied due to lack of manpower. (Four of them
have even been fixed already, but haven't been verified as fixed.) These
don't include the last two that I reported (which included patches.) Given
an Athena release schedule, I can make a specific commitment as to what I can
fix and test and install.
	Rather than do this as an individual, I'd like to do this as a
contractor from Watchmaker Computing, which I believe you are already
familiar with. I understand that Athena isn't interested in hiring a
contractor to perform this task; all I ask is permission to use Athena's name
in advertising. Since one of the services Watchmaker Computing intends to
provide is GNUemacs support, I would like to be able to take credit for
"maintaining GNUemacs for MIT Project Athena".
	Please let me know if you are interested in this proposal, or if you
have any problems with it. I'd also like to know if you think that Athena's
schedule for 7.2 is such that I could begin making changes in preparation for
it.