Comment by yogthos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yogthos | Hacker News Reader

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The fact that you're moving on from Light Table is perfectly fine. The problem is that you're not bothering to provide any sort of handover strategy.

A lot of people are interested in the project, would like to contribute to it, and would be happy to take over where you left off. However, this is difficult to do due to lack of documentation and any support from yourself.

You can read the experiences of one person trying to contribute here (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/light-table-discussi...) and here (https://github.com/JonyEpsilon/gorilla-repl/issues/132).

Since you're not going to be actively working on the project, why not involve the community find individuals or an organization that would continue developing and maintaining it.

Surely, this is not too much to ask and it would be a responsible way to transition from the project.

I have stated from the beginning that I'm more than happy to get people more involved. When it has come up before I've said I'd gladly give people commit rights. There are only a couple of people who have contributed with any degree of frequency where that would make sense - Josh Cole and Mike Innes come to mind, for example.

I will certainly not stand in the way of the community and we're more than happy to help maintain.

My point was that the community needs more support from you in order to be able to contribute meaningfully. This involves actively finding people who would be willing to take over the project and working with them to help them get started.

Simply dropping the code on GitHub and saying that you're glad for people to get involved is not a sufficient level of support at this point. This might've worked when the project was younger and smaller, but it's just too big for people to be able to dive into now. The links I provided are a prime example of the problem.

Since you found the time to make a blog post about Eve, surely you could also make a post stating that you're looking to hand over Light Table and you'd like to help facilitate the transition.

That's fair. I'll get on it.

As someone who dug in far enough to write a simple plugin and then backed straight out again with no wish to go back I agree completely. If the plan is that LT should survive then I do not think simply open sourcing it is going to be enough; it needs the core team to do at least a final push on getting the fundamentals right, clarifying the internal api's, and documenting the way forward. Then maybe the community can take over. As it is, I'm not hopeful.

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