RE: The future of the Subversion book - Thank-you

Mike,

Thank-you for all your work with subversion. It is a lot of work and we would not have the tool we have today without the effort of people like you.

Regards,
Luke Perkins
2581 Flagstone Drive
San Jose, CA 95132
Cell: 719-339-0987

-----Original Message-----
From: C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 5, 2018 12:39 PM
To: dev_at_subversion.apache.org
Subject: The future of the Subversion book

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 2018-09-06 23:13:26 CEST