Hello, all!
It's been a long while since I interacted with any degree of regularity
with this community, and I've had to come to terms with some essential
truths.
First, my time as an active Subversion developer has *definitely*
passed. Oh, I may get a chance to return to it at some point in the
(likely distant) future, but without CollabNet commissioning my efforts
here, I simply don't have the extra cycles these days to offer. Given
that my contributions over the last few years can be measured in the
smallest of numbers, this isn't news to anyone here and certainly has no
effect on the trajectory and velocity of the project!
Of greater concern to (at least) myself is that the cognitive distance I
have from Subversion these days -- combined with the craziness of just
life as an twice-employed[1], soccer-coaching, father of three -- means
that the Subversion book is getting next-to-zero attention, too. Oh,
I'm still paying attention to the work our translators are doing, and
wordsmithing here and there as concerns are raised. But the
(as-yet-unfinished) trunk of the book is still attached to Subversion
1.8, which means that this community has pounded out all kinds of
improvements whose documentation is mostly limited to release notes and
email threads. Put simply, the service that Ben and Fitz (both looooong
gone from contributing to the book at all) and I formerly offered to the
wider Subversion community has arguably now become a disservice.
I'm done telling myself that I can fix this by re-engaging and taking up
authorship again. That just isn't gonna happen. It's time to pass the
torch to someone else, and I would love to immediately begin tossing
around some ideas toward this end.
To be clear, red-bean.com is happy to continue hosting the book's
HTML/PDF builds. The source lives at SourceForge these days, and I can
grant commit permissions (or transfer ownership) as needed. Moreover,
there's no deadline for maintainership handoff that I'm trying to impose
or anything. I want to do what's best for the Subversion ecosystem,
whatever this community determines that to be.
Feel free to consider alternate approaches, too, such as conversion of
the book's content into a Wiki. But I would caution against doing
anything that discourages or complicates the workflow of the book's
translators, especially since they are the only ones actually doing
anything in the project at all! :-)
So what do you think?
-- Mike
[1] Beyond my regular CollabNet work week, I give additional hours as a
member of the staff of my local church.
Received on 2018-09-05 21:39:48 CEST