Release is desperately needed

[DanielVartanov]

The last version 1.3.0 was released in year 2010, 6 years ago!
People needed to pull down changes which were made since that.

Please please please bump up and release a new version.

[glebm]

The maintainer of this gem hasn't been active on Github since 2014 and hasn't tweeted nor instagram'd, nor flickr'd anything since November 2015. His homepage and blog are gone as well.

[DanielVartanov]

@glebm oh god, are you assuming the worst? Let's hope it's not the case. But someone needs to take over maintenance anyway. I really don't want to undertake for this task as I'll won't devote enough time for the project, but what would you suggest for such case? Is there a common protocol in the community?

[glebm]

oh god, are you assuming the worst?

Not necessarily, as he also seems to have a history of quitting the internet: https://twitter.com/robolson/status/667436321812701189

Is there a common protocol in the community?

Usually, an org that uses the gem heavily and is willing to maintain it forks the repo, emails rubygems explaining the situation to get ownership of the gem, and contacts github to set the new repo as the canonical one. There are several precedents, such as rake.

[DanielVartanov]

@glebm great, huge thanks for explanation

[betesh]

Usually, an org that uses the gem heavily and is willing to maintain it forks the repo, emails rubygems explaining the situation to get ownership of the gem, and contacts github to set the new repo as the canonical one. There are several precedents, such as rake.

Has anyone done that yet?

[betesh]

@technicalpickles @MarkMenard @mislav @blaine @jacqui @myronmarston @kachick @illuminerdi @syborg @trevorrowe @larrytheliquid @chrisZingel @josh @Empact @akahn @chubas @anselmoalves

All of you have contributed to this gem in the past. If any of you are interested in maintaining it, please let us know by commenting on this issue. Once one of you has volunteered and there is agreement among contributors about who will take on this role, we can then reach out to rubygems and github to let them know that there is a new maintainer.

[betesh]

Since nobody else has spoken up, I will be reaching out to github and rubygems

[Empact]

@betesh FYI I use webmock for current projects.
https://github.com/bblimke/webmock

[chrisk]

Hi all, thank you for posting. I'm really sorry for leaving you hanging for so long.

When I last worked on this project, I was very sick. It eventually got serious enough that I had to stop working, pack up my apartment in San Francisco, and move home, putting my life on hold completely.

Thankfully, I eventually made it through, and I'm doing much, much better these days.

Back when I was first starting to get better, I decided to fill the newly available hours of the day with activities I thought would help shore up my physical and mental health. I started exercising again, joined a choir, started getting fluent in Spanish again, got a skateboard, started volunteering, and on and on. I spent a lot of time caring for my mother after she got sick herself and ended up in the hospital. These days, of all things, I actually get paid to sing in a professional vocal group sometimes. It's been a strange & winding path, but one I needed to walk.

All through this, I wasn't paying attention to this project, nor responding to a lot of friends who were concerned about me. I think I was pretty burned out in addition to being sick, and just wasn't ready to deal with the responsibility of working on this again, or of maintaining those relationships. So I put it all off. In hindsight, I think that was probably a healthy defense mechanism for me, but I wish I had let all of you know what was happening. Not least of all @blaine, who started this project and graciously let me start maintaining it way back in 2008. I apologize for that. I know lots of people use FakeWeb to make important things, and it's not unreasonable to expect a minimum level of communication to reciprocate your investment in a tool.

With all that out of the way, I'm here to say that I'm going to take up maintaining FakeWeb once again. You can expect a point release to restore compatibility with all current mainstream versions of Ruby. After that, I'll start on the rest of the open pull requests.

I just got a new Mac, so I'm currently setting up my environment. After I finish that you should start seeing activity on this project again.

If you need something in the meantime, certainly try WebMock and see if it works for you. That project actually started as a copy-and-paste of FakeWeb, oddly enough, although it has developed considerably since then. And if you've already switched and it works for you, then great.

Going forward, I think it's important for FakeWeb to continue to exist so that we always have a small, simple, fast tool for the 99% case of just testing code that uses Net::HTTP. Also, the gem has been an inspiration (and a template) for library authors in many other languages over the years, and that's been good for software development everywhere. I'd like to keep that going.

Okay. Whew. Thanks for reading all that, and thank you all again for your concern. If you have a fix to contribute, please do continue to open/update issues/pull requests and I'll merge. Updates should post here as I reference this ticket in commits. Onwards!

--Chris