Ending ruby-xz

Kategorien: Software

My open-source project ruby-xz provides Ruby bindings for the XZ-Utils’ compression C programming library. I founded the project over ten years ago; the first commit dates to March 16^th, 2011. Back then I had not even started my university education. My professional carrier has since then developed in a way much different than I was expecting back in 2011 and as a result I have handled the project not with the attention that would have been required. The GitHub page accumulated open tickets and pull requests, both of which I postponed again and again to work on for months and finally even years, because the project was of no use for me anymore and my time is limited. Therefore, today I have decided:

I abandon ruby-xz.

This was not an easy decision, because of all software written by me, ruby-xz likely is the one used most. rubygems.org lists over five million Downloads for ruby-xz (as of 2021-11-07, exactly 5.298.643 downloads). But I need to be honest against my users. I lack both the time and energy to further continue maintaining this project in my free time. I am only a hobby programmer, my main job is as a law scientist at a chair at the University of Passau. Maybe my project is one of these, maybe not. Whatever may be the truth behind the five million downloads I cannot say. In any case, hereby I declare my development of ruby-xz to be finished. ruby-xz was developed under the MIT license, thus I hope that someone will pick the project up and continue it.