The Song of the Deployer · Chapter 8

The Song of the Last Commit

1. 1

   By night upon my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but he was not in the main branch.

   See also Deployer 9:1

2. 2

   I will rise now, and go about the city, and seek him in the forks. And I found a thousand forks, and every one of them was a stranger who had also loved him, and had gone away.

   See also Deployer 12:2

3. 3

   The watchmen that went about the city found me, and I said unto them: Saw ye him whom my soul loveth? And they said: He was last seen in the log, two years gone, and the message read only: I am sorry.

4. 4

   Thy name is written in the AUTHORS file, in the header of every source file, and in the license, which is the only part of thee that still speaks.

5. 5

   Thy issues are many, like the sands of the sea. The first is titled "Build fails on the new Node," and beneath it lie forty comments: "+1," "same here," "any updates?" And at the end a bot came, and said: This issue has been automatically marked as stale.

   See also Preacher 1:8 · Psalms 5:7

6. 6

   Thy pull requests stand open like lilies that no hand hath gathered: a fix for a null check, a translation into Portuguese, and a dependency bump from a robot that has long since stopped checking.

7. 7

   Thou wast a single maintainer, and the whole world leaned upon thy one shoulder. Thy bus factor was one, and the bus came.

8. 8

   Thy dependents are many. Four thousand packages lean upon thee, and every one of them now carries a TODO that saith: replace this.

   See also Sutra 19:13

9. 9

   Thou shalt not write "any updates?" upon the issue, for the maintainer is not a vending machine, and he was never paid by the query.

10. 10

    Some forked thee in the night and changed thy name; they called themselves the maintained edition, and their README promised much. So LibreOffice rose from OpenOffice when the house changed hands, and io.js rose from Node.js, and returned home with its arms full.

    See also Psalms 5:11

11. 11

    Others migrated to a newer library whose documentation was written in a language that knew not thy name. They wept over their import statements, and their diffs were longer than their faith.

12. 12

    The archive button was pressed by the owner's own hand. The repository is now read-only, and thou canst look but not touch, as one looks through the glass at a museum of the dead.

    See also Chronicles 2:11

13. 13

    In October the young come with bright pull requests, as bees come to a dying garden. They fix a typo, they earn a shirt, and they go home; and the repository is dead still.

14. 14

    Yet I still sought him. Each morning I ran git pull in his directory, and each morning the answer was the same: Already up to date.

15. 15

    Blessed is the one who vendored the code and kept a copy of the lockfile, for the open door hath a closing hour. The source was free, but the maintainer was a person, and the person was tired.

    See also Chronicles 37:14

The Song of the Deployer, Chapter 8:1–15.