[Nano-devel] What's up with chris, and how to move forward

[Chris Allegretta]

I wanted to take a few minutes and let folks know what's been going on 
with me, in case you were curious, have been asking where I am, or just 
generally are an inquisitive type.

I've been maintaining nano on and off for more than since 1999.  In that 
time it has grown to become the default editor on some GNU/Linux 
distributions (which I still find amazing), came packaged with many 
non-free systems (certainly intriguing if sub-optimal), and generally 
has been an outstanding success.  A lot of that success is owed to our 
great and passionate users, and the folks like Benno, Jordi and our 
continuing patch contributors, and those who are still excited about 
adding new things or changing things up.

I've found myself to more and more be in the position of trying to keep 
nano static, keep the featureset more restrained, keeping consistency 
with things like flag names and behavior at the expense of new or better 
functionality.  I don't think this is particularly popular with the more 
passionate folks, and I feel bad about these interactions. But I do feel 
like there's a very silent majority of folks who just use nano 
(including myself :-)) who don't want nano to change toooooo fast from 
version to version.

This is all coupled with the fact that, like I said back in 2003 when I 
first stepped down as maintainer 
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/2003-08/msg00016.html), 
nano has absolutely become more than I'd ever imagined, which is great. 
However, every new feature suggestion or non-bug patch feels so onerous 
or unnecessary to me as a result and I honestly frequently dread 
checking my email now. It's wrong for me to feel this way. I'm really 
not being fair to letting nano grow and thrive and really should step 
out of the picture.  At the same time, I've never really encountered 
anyone who shares enough of my vision to just step away completely. So 
now I just feel like a gatekeeper, and it's just a bad place to be in, 
and I assume for everyone.

So hopefully this explains why I haven't been as visible, and I 
apologize for folks who have been trying to keep things moving.  I'm 
very interested in any feelings people have on these topics, and I want 
to be clear how incredibly valuable everyone is to the project.  Please 
don't take any of this personally, there are many personal issues 
swirling around this as well on my side. Also, feel free to be critical 
of me as needed if you want to reply, privately or publicly.  More 
conversation here is better; maybe there is some solution to this which 
is not obvious to me.  We should definitely try changing things up, and 
sorry I haven't put forth any recommendations here.  But I'm certainly 
very interested in what you all might propose.

Thanks for listening!

Chris A
-- 
Chris Allegretta        http://www.asty.org

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