pan orphaned - willing to volunteer for maintainership

[Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists uni-x org>]

Hi fellows,

the Pan newsreader - http://pan.rebelbase.com/ - was so far maintained 
by mpeters and is now since 2006-09-19 on the list of orphaned packages 
- http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/OrphanedPackages. To not 
loose this piece of software from the pool I would jump into it, if 
nobody else is interested.

Pan in the devel branch of CVS is version 0.99, which means it is from 
the upstream side beta / complete rewrite tree, dated May 28, 2006. FE5 
and FE4 both ship the stable upstream release 0.14.2.91, not touched in 
upstream since Jan 24, 2004.
From my point of view I can not judge whether the Pan upstream 
development will fix bugs and extend functionality to release the 1.0 
within the next 6 weeks. Though the Pan site states for the latest beta 
release from August 18, 2006:

"Compared to previous weeks, this is a very incremental relase. 1.0 is 
just around the corner..."

Question:
What should be done? There are 2 possible routes I see:
a) Keeping the beta / development upstream and doing a pan FE update 
rebuild from 0.99 -> 0.113.
b) Increasing the epoch to get the same stable release version of FE5 
and FE4 into devel / soon to be released FE6.

This is a call for votes - especially by those of you using Pan.

Regards

Alexander