Jamis Buck lets go of Capistrano

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2009/2/25/net-ssh-capistrano-and-saying-goodbye

by sofal • 17 years ago

62 41 17 years ago

weblog.jamisbuck.org

henning• 17 years ago

At least, because it's free software, the users have the source and can use that to migrate to alternatives or carry on the projects without him.

mpk• 17 years ago

Well, this sounds like a good opportunity for me to mention an alternative deployment tool with a cooler name : Vlad the Deployer.

http://rubyhitsquad.com/Vlad_the_Deployer.html

dustineichler• 17 years ago

Yeah, I second this. It's really useful and easy to use.

larrywright3• 17 years ago

I would have had a lot more respect for Vlad if the developers hadn't acted like complete jerks about it: http://rubyhitsquad.com/Ruby_Hit_Squad.html

Building a competing tool because you think you can do it better is fine. Building a competing tool because you want to take a different approach is also fine. Being rude isn't fine, and shouldn't be tolerated in any community.

richcollins• 17 years ago

== SPECIAL THANKS:

* First, of course, to Capistrano. For coming up with the idea and providing a lot of meat for the recipes.

http://github.com/fs/vlad/tree/master

omouse2• 17 years ago

If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Really that page is a joke and isn't very rude. It's friendly competition and clearly states why they're competing: needless complexity in the existing tool.

>Being rude isn't fine, and shouldn't be tolerated in any community.

That page isn't rude and the community will tolerate being rude if the code is any good. Look at Linus Torvalds', Theo de Raadt's, and other awesome coders' comments! They're still appreciated by the community for their code and if rudeness weren't tolerated, they'd be kicked out quick quick.

mikeryan• 17 years ago

Actually after his last announcement of no longer supporting Windows for Capistrano and Net::SSH this will hopefully be a good thing, assuming the community picks it up. Would be nice if he could find a designated maintainer but either way I doubt these projects will go to the wayside.

Wish I had the time I'd contribute more and props to Jamis for the great tools.

jupiter• 17 years ago

He probably doesn't imagine just for how many people he made life easier every day. Great job, props and good luck for whatever is coming next!

tptacek2• 17 years ago

This seems a lot healthier and more mature than the industry standard approach towards abandoned open source projects, which is absentee landlordism. He's giving people opportunity and the clear signal that it's OK to fork the project.

jmtulloss• 17 years ago

I think Github will really help that situation. The problem with traditional open source projects is that somebody can control who contributes back, and if that person isn't around, the project dies. Sure you can fork, but there's no way for others to keep track of where the project has gone to. When this happens, it tends to just acquire a new name and become something else.

Github solves all these problems. Github rocks.

there2• 17 years ago

> but there's no way for others to keep track of where the project has gone to

so now instead of searching around for the project's new homepage, you have to search through dozens of forks each with one or two bugfixes or random changes and find out which one is the most actively maintained?

i'm all for git's concept of forking to make your own development easier, but unless you merge your fixes back into a mainline distribution, it's just stupid and creates confusion for everyone else relying on that software.

say you want to run a script that someone has written that uses net-ssh. until now you could be assured that they wrote it using the official net-ssh ruby module and it will work with the one you have installed. so from now on you'll have to install the random net-ssh version that someone has stashed away on his github account? and what happens when that particular fork of net-ssh stops getting maintained? someone else forks it and now you have to install a different version?

what about the security ramifications of using some random person's fork of an ssh module that you are entrusting to login to your servers? would you install a forked version of openssh from an unknown source on your server or would you rather get it from a known, trusted source?

Harkins6• 17 years ago

"Lets go" is not an accurate title, "abandons" would be a better word.

He's written good code and it sucks that he's burning out, but it's not cool to ignore questions and not even try to find a maintainer. Capistrano is used by nearly every Rails project, abandoning it is grossly irresponsible.

jamis3• 17 years ago

Why is it "grossly irresponsible" of me to take this action? Are lives going to be lost or injured as a result? Will the economy suffer? Will my leaving this project result in a health epidemic?

I've never made any promises about the project. I never claimed that I would be around for ever. I never said I would ignore questions, either -- just that I would ignore emails sent directly to me. But I'm going to remain on the mailing list, and will remain about as responsive there as I have (and I'm, by far, the most frequest poster there).

joshwa• 17 years ago

Why not look for someone to take over as maintainer? I'm sure an appropriate person in the community would step forward.

This is the traditional method in most open-source communities... particularly where there are canonical distribution sources such as the rubyforge gems.

Harkins6• 17 years ago

Because a lot of people relied on you and you left them hanging. You can beat up on the straw man about killing people, but ditching the project isn't cool.

Harkins6• 17 years ago

And for what it's worth: I wasn't trying to yank your chain, or be one more bit of stress in your life. I didn't know you'd stay on the mailing list, that's good of you.

Setting up the website, writing docs, writing the mailing list, taking improvements -- you might not have made an explicit promise to be immortal and support capistrano and all western civilization in perpetuity, but your actions led people to believe they could rely on you.

eli• 17 years ago

I disagree with you, but I think this is a common enough viewpoint that it shouldn't just modded down into oblivion.

To state the obvious, he owes you nothing. The source code is there. If this were proprietary software and the vendor went bust, would you expect its employees to show up for work every day and support former customers for free? Now consider that Jamis has been doing just that this whole time!

Harkins6• 17 years ago

He does owe the community of users something. He didn't write docs, set up a website, set up a mailing list, etc. because he just thought it was a fun hack he was tossing out there, he was building a community of users. All he owed was a "Hey, anyone interested?" blog post before dropping it. I didn't know he was still going to answer questions on the mailing list -- that in and of itself is probably enough.

I'm not a heartless bastard or a useless eater, I just think it's not cool to ditch people you encouraged to rely on you. It's not at all unreasonable if he's burning out, but that doesn't make it classy.

100k• 17 years ago

When acts_as_solr was abandoned by its old maintainer, there was a lot of confusion about what to do with the code. Unfortunately, no one was named as the maintainer of the project, and no one could push to the official repository. It didn't help that the code was moved to GitHub with git newbie problems, like directories not being in the repo, that stopped it from working out of the box.

Eventually, things sorted themselves out (here's the maintainers' fork: http://github.com/mattmatt/acts_as_solr/tree/master) but there are still frequent questions on the mailing list asking why the plugin doesn't work. It would have been better to name a maintainer who could manage things.

I hope Capistrano can avoid these problems.

jballanc• 17 years ago

So long and thanks for all the fish^H^H^H^H AWESOME SOFTWARE!

MikeBailey• 17 years ago

Capistrano is mature and stable. Jamis deserves respect for the original idea and the implementation.

For the vast majority of people, the current version will work just fine. When we all get sick of git and start using the next source control system then Capistrano will need support for that but I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Massive thanks to Jamis for all the love he's given to these projects over the last few years.

Jamis Buck lets go of Capistrano

Related Stories