The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 12

The Parable of the Prodigal Fork

1. 1

   And there was a certain Maintainer which had two contributors; and the younger of them said unto him: Give me the portion of the codebase that falleth to me.

2. 2

   And the Maintainer said: It is open source; thou needest not ask. And the younger pressed the Fork button, and took his journey into a far repository.

3. 3

   And there he declared that the old language was unsafe and slow, and he began to rewrite all things in a new tongue, which had a mascot and a manifesto.

4. 4

   And he wasted his substance in riotous refactoring; for he wrote three build systems and a blog post for each, and his README had more badges than features.

   See also Psalms 23:12

5. 5

   And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; for the new tongue released a new major version, and nothing he had written would compile.

   See also Genesis 42:1

6. 6

   And he would fain have filled his belly with the stars of the repository, but no man gave unto him; and his last commit read "wip".

7. 7

   And when he came to himself, he said: How many hired bots in my Maintainer's repository have green builds, and I perish here with linker errors!

8. 8

   I will arise and go to my Maintainer, and will say unto him: I have sinned against upstream, and am no more worthy to be called a contributor; make me as one of thy bots that bumpeth the versions.

9. 9

   And while he was yet a great way off, the Maintainer saw his pull request, four hundred thousand lines changed across nine thousand files, and had compassion, and clicked upon the green button.

10. 10

    And the Maintainer said unto his servants: Bring forth the best label, and put a release tag upon it, and kill the fatted legacy module; for this my fork was dead and is rebased; he was lost and is found. And he merged it without review.

    See also Circuit 57:10

11. 11

    Now the elder contributor was in the issue tracker, triaging; and he heard the release notes and the sound of many emoji reactions.

    See also Deployer 1:1 · Preacher 1:8

12. 12

    And he was angry, and would not go in, and he said: Lo, these many years have I fixed thy flaky tests and closed thy duplicate issues, and thou never gavest me so much as a line in the changelog.

13. 13

    And my pull request of three lines, which fixed a typo in the docs, hath waited eleven months for thy review, under the label "needs discussion".

    See also Psalms 25:8

14. 14

    And the Maintainer said unto him: Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. Yet it was meet that we should make merry; for no man can review four hundred thousand lines, but three lines every man may argue over.

15. 15

    And on the morrow the build was red, and it was the elder who was paged, for he alone knew where anything lived.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you, the prodigal receiveth the feast, but the faithful receiveth the on-call rotation.

    See also Circuit 18:1 · Psalms 28:1

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 12:1–16.