[Announcement] Passive maintenance mode

[Mange]

This gem is now entering passive maintenance mode; I will not be actively maintaining it anymore.

What exactly does this mean?

• I will not guarantee any responses on issues or PRs. I will probably respond, but I cannot guarantee when.
• I probably won't add or change anything without prompting.
• Security issues will be fixed. Please send me an email as per the instructions in the README!
• Major bugs will be prioritized.
• Minor bugs will probably only be dealt with if a PR is opened.
• No feature request will be honored unless it comes in the form of a PR, and it's not even guaranteed then.
• It is okay to ping me on issues and ask for updates. Don't bother doing it after just a few days, though.

Why?

Maintaining open source software requires energy and a "want"/"passion". I've not been using this project myself for years, and I mainly work in other things than Rails at this point. That means I'm far removed from this project and see no personal gain in maintaining the energy to keep this going.

At work, I cannot maintain this project. At home, I'd rather spend time with my children and on projects that I'm currently passionate about.

I'm still pretty proud of the project and I don't want to see it gone, so I want to keep updating it when needed. But on the other hand, the feature set is pretty stable and well working now (AFAIK) so I also don't see the need to pretend to be actively maintaining it.

Please: Prompt me when things break and I will probably fix it. I won't guarantee how fast I'll move, but I'll try to make the effort sometimes. The bigger the issue, the more likely it is that I'll do something about it.

Contributions are welcome, like always. I love contributions and seeing other people getting value from this project. Keep doing it! I apologize for not replying quickly. :bowing_man:

This is open-source. You can always fork and maintain that fork yourself if you feel that's warranted. That's how this project started in the first place, so I know the feeling. :smiley:

How long?

I don't know. Maybe if I started to use this project in my professional life again I could find the time to maintain it despite being "boring".

I cannot guarantee that happening at all, so no timeline sadly.

Can I take over? (or Can I become a contributor?)

It's not impossible, but it's not likely I would accept someone I haven't worked with IRL or know on a personal level. That's because I want some form of creative control over the direction and I want to maintain the existing code style. If I know you I'm more likely to know that this will keep working the way I want it to.

Still, as I said, it's not impossible even if we've never met. Show me good PRs, bug triaging, documentation fixes, whatever and you're a candidate if you ask for it.

Actually, a triager would be very welcome; someone that can ask follow-up questions on issues, create test cases for the problems, and so on. That sort of thing. That would definitely make it much more likely for me to spring into action; just as good a finished PRs would be. (Probably even more; reviewing code takes energy!)

Let me know if you want to help out. :heart:

Closing words

Thank you for these years! I won't be gone, but I'll have my back turned. (Poke me with a soft finger if my attention is needed.)

Thank you for understanding. (Or if you don't, at least thank you for reading.)

[jeremy]

Thanks for your creation and maintenance over the years, @Mange.

[midnight-wonderer]

Updating roadie-rails today; thus, just checking the repo.
Your mentioning that you don't do Rails anymore made me wonder what kind of project you are doing nowadays?

Since GitHub is a kind of Social Network, I hope it is not inappropriate to ask for some updates here. 🐯

[Mange]

Your mentioning that you don't do Rails anymore made me wonder what kind of project you are doing nowadays?

I'm actually back on working on Rails since after I wrote that - it's been 4 years even. But at the time I was mostly doing Rust and Lua in my hobby hours, and non-Rails Ruby (API servers, tooling, GraphQL APIs, test helpers, etc.) and frontend Javascript at work.

Even though I'm back on Rails, the company I work for don't use ActionMailer for emails, but rather an Email-as-a-Service provider so non-developers can help out with the content and formatting of them.

Still mostly doing Lua (for Neovim and AwesomeWM) and Rust in my spare time, when I'm coding.

Since GitHub is a kind of Social Network, I hope it is not inappropriate to ask for some updates here.

I don't mind. :slightly_smiling_face: Perhaps subscribers of this issue would, though. If you want to keep conversing with me about it, feel free to email me at me@mange.dev. :heart:

[Swolie]

@Mange what do you recommend we use now to create emails?

[Mange]

@Mange what do you recommend we use now to create emails?

I don't know. You could still use Roadie and emails inside ActionMailer, or perhaps go with one of the multitude of Emaill-as-a-Service platforms like Mailchimp, Customer.io, Mailgun, etc.

It's not something I've actively working with anywhere currently, so I'm not all that in the game anymore.

[Mange]

Notice: A new maintainer has been added: @PikachuEXE

They may or may not decide to change maintenance status.

My position remain the same: I don't use this library and don't have motivation to do major things to it, but it is fairly stable and working so it doesn't require much more. It's basically "done".