What to do with pyblosxom

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

David Ascher started using PyBlosxom and there are a couple of other users who look like they're just starting to use it as well. I think that's fantastic--especially given that the project is on life support right now.

Life support? What makes me say that? Well, I've been threatening to do a 1.0.1 release for months but never did it. Development has all but stopped because there aren't any active developers. Back when I released 1.0, I told people I wasn't going to touch it for 6 months because I was really burned out on this project and I had too many other things going on. So then nothing happened except a mild trickle on the mailing lists.

I'm not sure what to do. I can't really take on another project and push it through the motions. PyBlosxom has documentation, but it's mediocre and has large gaps and it's spread across two sites one of which I don't think most people get to. The debian maintainer for the PyBlosxom package needs help updating the package, but I don't know enough about packages to help and haven't had the time to work on it. There has been some interest in a flavour registry, but it seems that there's only interest from a "we want a flavour registry" perspective and very very little to no interest from a "I'd like to contribute to a flavour registry" perspective. Blah blah blah.

There are a bunch of issues and no one to solve them. I'm really hesitant to throw my energy at this project again. Part of me wonders if I should just start solving some of the smaller problems that need to get solved (lack of testing infrastructure, lack of centralized documentation, ...) and then go from ther step by step. Seems so overwhelming.

Not to mention that my life is a mess right now--I'm still moving and I've got a list of promises I haven't fulfilled dating back two or three years. Then I got bitched out on one of the projects I work on for being an elitist egomaniac. I just want to help identify and fix problems to make things better/easier/faster/more useful. Bummer.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.