New Whenever release, maintainership and future plans

[Ben Langfeld]

Hello all,

Firstly, allow me to introduce myself; my name is Ben Langfeld, I'm a software developer mainly using Ruby, and the maintainer of Adhearsion and related projects among others. I'm English, but based in Rio de Janeiro, and an occasional speaker at Ruby conferences, so some of us may have met in person before.

Many will have noticed a reduction in Whenever activity over the last couple of years, and some may be aware that Javan has been seeking help to maintain Whenever (see https://github.com/javan/whenever/issues/618). I recently volunteered to provide such assistance, Javan accepted this offer, and I've spent the last few weekends making a dent in open issues/pull requests, closing 28 issues, merging 6 pull requests and preparing fixes to a collection of bugs.

I'm glad to announce that today I released Whenever 0.9.5, whose changelog can be found at https://github.com/javan/whenever/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#095--june-12-2016. This is a bugfix release, the first since October 24th 2014, and is based on the efforts of at least the 11 contributors mentioned in the changelog; I'd like to thank those people for their contributions once again.

This is just the start of an effort to reinvigorate the Whenever project. When I became involved, Javan indicated four main points he wanted to address:

1. Dealing with the open pull requests and issues. Though there are now fewer, there remain a significant number of open tickets. They are all now triaged, however, with tags applied to identify types (usage questions, bug reports / fixes, feature requests / additions) and logical groupings (Ruby version manager issues, Capistrano issues, etc). This triaging allows us to address the most important issues first and get the most effective results from our efforts. Expect the number of open tickets, as well as the mean time a ticket remains open, to fall over the coming months.
2. Drop support for old rubies and modernize the codebase. Whenever now only supports Ruby 1.9.3+ and is better tested on the latest versions of MRI and JRuby. There are almost certainly parts of the code which could be further cleaned up as we are able to rely on newer Ruby features, but this will be a gradual effort as those sections are otherwise touched.
3. Freshen up the README to address common issues and use cases. There have already been some additions / clarifications made to the README, but I would like to encourage anyone who has further improvements to suggest to do so in the form of a Pull Request. It's common for users of open source projects to be reluctant to contribute because they don't know how they can help, but documentation is a very good way to do so and is often overlooked; contributions of this kind are very much welcome!
   
4. Extract Capistrano support into a separate gem. The core functionality of Whenever is really quite separate from the functionality for triggering it from a Capistrano run; separating this deployment layer from the core has many benefits in clearer separation of responsibilities, cleaner documentation and decoupled release cycles. No progress has been made on this yet, favouring a focus on item #1, but you should expect to see this happen in the near future.
   

In addition to these items, a lot of my focus will be on approaching a v1.0.0 release as soon as possible in order to pin down the API stability of Whenever. You can see the current goals at https://github.com/javan/whenever/milestones, but I would like to encourage further discussion of what these should include; please make your thoughts known on this list. 

Additionally, I would like to assure authors of pull requests that your contributions will be addressed swiftly going forward; for those who have open pull requests, I would encourage you to check that they are up to date with the master branch and can be easily merged, which will help me very much to get them into a release ASAP. For those with open issues, I urge you to update them with as much information as possible (Ruby version, application Gemfile and Gemfile.lock, schedule files, exact commands executed, crontabs generated and full stdout / log file output) as well as to re-test your issues on this latest release to ensure they have not already been fixed, or reporting any resolutions you have been able to arrive at independently. The most detailed tickets will be addressed first.

I look forward to working with you all to make Whenever the best it can be. Thank you all, especially Javan, for your efforts so far; let's go continue to kick ass.

Regards,

Ben Langfeld