Luca Guidi weblog

Starting an open source project is like to adopt a child, it takes time and cure, and, in general, you should help it to grow up.
But we are human, and often we don't pay enough attention to our children, so, the more faster the environment where they live evolves, the less they are useful. A great and paradoxical example is Click to Globalize: I ideated it, created, developed, presented at Rails to Italy and at Euro RailsConf, but still not compatible with Rails 2.2.x! And I contributed both to the 2.2.x branch and with the rails-i18n team!

I felt guilty in the past months, for turning from my projects, but the answer was: the OSS ecosystem will survive, and if a project is unmaintained it will be forked (if worthy) or it will die. And it was my excuse for spend time with music or photography, and to the other stuff I like to call analogue life.

I believe that hiatus could be a good thing if it helps the author of a project to understand and focus on the direction the project should take.
I love Open Source it made me a better programmer, and now it's time to be honest with myself and with the Community and decide which project will be maintained.

So, here my plans:

• Click to Globalize: it's most used and well-known project of mine, it will be compatible with the new i18n API, it will be framework agnostic and I'm working to avoid the around_filter technique.
• Sashimi: I will fix svn and git issues, and make compatible with Ruby 1.9.1. Probably I will rewrite a part of it and cover with rSpec. It was my pilot project for Ruby gems, Open Source activities and it will survive :)
• Assets Packager: it's very tiny and very useful for me, I recently made compatible with Sprockets. A survivor.
• Acts As Resource: it's my first Rails plugin, I'm really proud of it, but never used and it will die. Maybe it could be useful for ActiveModel contributions.
• Nested Models: no longer needed, due to the merge with the great patch by Eloy Duran, available in Rails 2.3.
• Plugin Migrations: I'm waiting for the adoption of my patch, if not released with Rails 2.3, I will continue to maintain.
• Cached Models: last but not least. I'm really really really proud of this plugin. It has been mentioned by RailsEnvy #047, but I didn't received the feedback I expected. Since it's a really expensive, hard-to-maintain project, I'll soon decide about its destiny.