I'm stepping down as a maintainer to work on a fork

[Alexander Batischev]

Dear users,

As those of you who are following our issue tracker and IRC already
know, Newsbeuter have been in a bit of a pickle for a while now. About
a year after I became a maintainer, I emailed Andreas, the original
author and maintainer, telling him I'm ready to cut a release. That was
the first of a string of emails that never got a response.

At first I thought he was just busy and will write back in a week or
two, but as months went by and I didn't hear anything back, I became
less and less motivated to work on something that might never be
released.

Then our first security vulnerability hit, and shortly thereafter the
second. The thing with security is that fixes are usually published as
minor releases, not just patches somewhere in the repo as I was forced
to do. This, combined with increasing pressure from the community[1],
made me realize I got to deal with this block *now*.

I considered some half-measures, but ended up deciding to make a fork
and continue the development there. (Andreas was notified of this more
than three weeks ago, and didn't respond.) This also means that I am
stepping down as Newsbeuter maintainer.

So please welcome Newsboat[2], the spiritual successor of Newsbeuter!
We've just had our first release; migration from Newsbeuter is mostly
automated. Give it a try!

A fork, of course, is only half a solution. What prevents me from
disappearing just like Andreas did? Nothing. To deal with this risk,
I've asked another person to be a backup maintainer. (I got the idea
from Roman Cheplyaka[3].) The technicalities aren't quite over yet, so
I'm going to withhold the name for now. Subscribe to Newsboat's news
feed[4] to stay on top of things!

(The above might read like I'm angry with Andreas. I admit I'm a bit
bitter over the way he's handled this, but at the same time I'm grateful
for the opportunity he's given me. Life happens; I don't hold a grudge.)

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

  1. https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter/issues/525
  2. https://newsboat.org/
  3. https://ro-che.info/articles/2014-02-08-my-haskell-will
  4. https://newsboat.org/news.atom

--
Regards,
Alexander Batischev

PGP key 356961A20C8BFD03
Fingerprint: CE6C 4307 9348 58E3 FD94 A00F 3569 61A2 0C8B FD03

[Francesco Ariis]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 11:39:26PM +0300, Alexander Batischev wrote:
> Dear users,
>
> [..]

Good luck with your journey and thanks for the work on newsbeuter!