Shattered Crystalline Matrix

Down the way, where the nights are gay,
and the sun shines daily on the mountain top;
I took a trip on a sailing ship,
and when I reached Jamaica, I made a stop.

But I'm sad to say, I'm on my way;
I won't be back, for many a day.
My heart is down, my head is turning around,
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town.

— Lord Burgess, Jamaica Farewell

He is my only one, now that my time has come;
now that my life is done, we look into the sun.
"Seize the day, and don't you cry;
now it's time to say goodbye.
Even though, I'll be gone;
I will live on, live on."

— Dream Theater, A Change of Seasons

I just sent a mail to the Dosage mailing list announcing my retirement as maintainer; and this marks another step in the internal reorganisation of my personal project "workspace", as referred to in my previous post. Other projects going back on the shelf include Kali (the replacement services package being developed for Shadowfire), Eridanus (an IRC bot based on Mantissa and Twisted to which I haven't contributed much besides design advice), txAWS (a Twisted library wrapping Amazon Web Services APIs), txSmug (a Twisted library wrapping SmugMug's API), and FlyingCircus (an IRC quote database based on Mantissa).

What does being "shelved" entail? Well, firstly, it doesn't mean that I'm giving up completely on any of these projects, burning the source code, or refusing to ever work on them ever again. It does mean that I won't actively be thinking about or working on any of these projects; I might be persuaded to help someone out who's interested in taking over from me, but otherwise they're getting kicked out of my mental space to make room for working on other things.

This isn't necessarily the kiss of death for any of these projects; Dosage will slowly degrade over time, I guess, but maybe someone else will step up to the plate. Eridanus never really got any contributions from me, and the existing functionality isn't going to suddenly break. txAWS and txSmug are far from complete, but if you don't need anything beyond what they already provide, they're perfectly usable, and txAWS has other developers that may provide further contributions. Finally, FlyingCircus is pretty much "complete"; there's always room for improvement on any piece of software, of course, but it's perfectly usable as-is.

So, what am I going to be working on? Well, as always, most/all of my projects make use of Twisted and Divmod, and I'll continue contributing changes to those projects based on requirements of my own projects. Methanal is another project that falls into this category; and as a dependency / spin-off of the code base I work on for my day job, it'll probably keep ticking along. I'm not planning to package any new software for Debian, but I'll probably keep maintaining the software I'm already involved with, since there's not a huge amount of effort involved.

The "big one" is probably going to be EdgeVerse. In case you couldn't make any sense of the useless description on the website, or were too lazy to visit it, EdgeVerse is a project that's basically all about tracking media: books, movies, music, TV series, whatever. This includes tracking what you already own and have watched, tracking new releases that you're interested in, and of course tracking all of your friends too. It's ultimately a pretty ambitious project, and I'm not at all confident that it'll be able to succeed, but for now I'm going to be giving it a try (hopefully).

I'll no doubt be posting more about EdgeVerse in the days and weeks to come; if you're curious about the status of any project I haven't mentioned here, feel free to inquire in the comments, or by email / IRC / FriendFeed / whatever.

And the hope I had is dying;
and what we had has come undone;
then your smile, it melts away again.

— Caribou, Melody Day

As part of my new effort to actually start making progress again on some of my projects, I'm going through all the ones on my metaphorical desk, and deciding which ones to put back on the metaphorical shelf. One of those projects is the Debian New Maintainer process (and then more generally, being a Debian Developer); unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that this is one of those projects that needs to be shelved. Some of the delays in my progression through NM can be attributed to waiting on my AM and so on, but largely it has been a matter of not having the time to spend on NM. As time rolls on, it seems even less likely that I'll have the time to finish the process off, much less actually doing real work as a DD; there's just a handful of packages I've ever cared about, and I'm starting to care less and less about all of this in general. I'm not sure yet whether I'll keep maintaining the packages I'm currently involved with, or just cut them loose (almost all of them have co-maintenance, or no longer matter much).

This decision has been a bit more disturbing than I thought it would be, and I'll probably think about it a bit more in the days to come, but for now it looks like this is the end of the road for me.

Stay tuned for more news about what other projects are going on the shelf, and which ones may be seeing some real activity on my part.