Stepping down as maintainer

[jnicklas]

Hello everyone,

This has been de-facto true for a long time, but I'm hereby sort of officially stepping down as maintainer of Evergreen.

My reasons are:

1) I no longer believe that Jasmine is the future of testing JavaScript

2) I no longer believe that tying JavaScript unit tests to the DOM is a good idea

3) Where tests against the DOM are necessary, jsdom has become sufficiently competent, obviating the need for running the tests in an actual browser

4) Evergreen has poor support for the Rails asset pipeline. Supporting the asset pipeline would take a major rewriting effort.

5) For those seeking something like Evergreen, Konacha (https://github.com/jfirebaugh/konacha) offers a compelling alternative, which integrates nicely with the asset pipeline and uses the mocha testing framework which is far superior to Jasmine in my opinion.

In summary: I feel that Evergreen is no longer useful to me, I have a lot of other projects which divert my time, I believe there are better alternatives out there today which offer a nicer alternative.

Maybe someone else will feel that Evergreen as a project deserves the chance to live on, in that case, I will transfer ownership of the project to you. If no one steps up, I will change the README to reflect that the project is unmaintained and I will close the issue tracker on GitHub. This group will continue to be open for the time being.

I hope that you all understand this decision and that we can all continue to move the world of JavaScript testing forward. I want to send a personal thank you to all contributors who made this project possible.

/Jonas

[Jo Liss]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 5:36 PM, jnicklas <jonas....@gmail.com> wrote:
> 5) For those seeking something like Evergreen, Konacha
> (https://github.com/jfirebaugh/konacha) offers a compelling alternative,
> which integrates nicely with the asset pipeline and uses the mocha testing
> framework which is far superior to Jasmine in my opinion.

Hey Jonas,

Good job being explicit about stopping maintenance and not just tapering off.

Out of curiosity, when you say you find Mocha superior to Jasmine, can
you elaborate why?

I've never used Jasmine, but sometimes people ask me whether they
should use Konacha or jasmine_rails, and I'd like to have a better
answer than "Konacha is more awesome because I've contributed code to
it". :)

Jo

--
Jo Liss
http://www.opinionatedprogrammer.com/

[Stanislaw Pankevich]

It is very interesting to me, what is your current choice?

Could you write here the tools you are using now?

Thanks,

Stanislaw.

[Jonas Nicklas]

Jo: I find that Mocha has superior support for testing asynchronous
processes, which is kind of important when it comes to JS. It also
plays nicer with the node and JS eco system. Jasmine is pretty much
unusable in node.js. I'd rather use only one framework, regardless of
where I work and Mocha works everywhere.

Stanislaw: I prefer running in a node.js environment these days, if I
can. The tests run faster, it gives me better output, better command
line options, and just generally feels like a more stable, more
sustainable option. If that's not an option, I would suggest Konacha
as something which is fairly close to Evergreen in terms of
functionality, but more modern.

/Jonas

[Stanislaw Pankevich]

Got it, thanks!

[Jonas Nicklas]

I've taken action and put up a note that the project is unmaintained
and closed the issue tracker. If anyone wants to take over
maintenance, please contact me.

/Jonas