Happy 15th Birthday, 🦎!
(1) By Daniel Dumitriu (danield) on 2022-07-21 12:59:10 [source]
As it goes, today Fossil turns 15 - at least counting from the first commit in its canonical repository (Richard told us once about its CVSTrac roots):
λ fossil info root:trunk:2010-01-01
hash: a28c83647dfa805f05f3204a7e146eb1f0d90505 2007-07-21 14:09:59 UTC
child: dbda8d6ce9ddf01a16f6c81db2883f546298efb7 2007-07-21 14:10:57 UTC
tags: trunk
comment: initial empty baseline (user: drh)
Thanks to Richard and all the developers for this beautiful piece of software, and to the users for helping make it better. Let's hope the best years are still to come! 🎂
(2) By sean (jungleboogie) on 2022-07-21 21:52:04 in reply to 1 [link] [source]
YAY! Thank you Richard for creating it, making it free, fixing bugs, and putting up with all the requests to make Fossil (hopefully) better.
Of course, thanks for and to all the contributors over the 15 years. Some have come and gone and others have stuck around for the years. Thank you to whomever you are.
(3) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2022-07-21 22:40:48 in reply to 1 [link] [source]
As it goes, today Fossil turns 15 ...
That arguably makes Daniel D. the project's "unofficial(?) observer of birthdays" (he was also responsible for spotting Richard's pending 60th birthday). Daniel, a known fan of linguistics and language, taught me a new word today: encomium1. In order to help reinforce that word in my memory, here's my encomium...
Software comes and goes, with only a tiny percentage of FOSS projects remaining actively maintained a full 15 years. Though fossil's activity has varied wildly from year to year, and 2022 is by far no record year, it's never been inactive, averaging almost 3 checkins per day over that period2.
Since the sqlite project's official stance is that it will be supported through at least 2050, and Richard is well known for preferring to remain free of 3rd-party dependencies3, fossil will very likely exist at least as long as that, so we've still got a ways to go :). There's certainly no end to the perpetual TODO list, and we "have our work cut out for us," as the saying goes. It's both a pleasure and an honor to play a part in shaping and resolving that TODO list and to collaborate with other enthusiastic and skilled folks.
Onward...
- ^ Google defines it as "a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly"
- ^ and it's weird that 2020 ended with exactly 2020 checkins4
- ^ stopping short, so far, of writing his own mail server
- ^ perhaps not quite as weird as George having added nested markdown footnote support!5
- ^ noting that footnotes remain my favorite new feature of 2022.
(4) By hanche on 2022-07-22 09:22:12 in reply to 3 [link] [source]
Oops, seems I missed the party by one day. A belated happy birthday from me, too.
On footnotes: Here is one related to an even older piece of still active software: TeX. I am reminded of a footnote1 at the end of Ch 15 (p. 125) in the TeXbook. This footnote is a typical example of Knuth's style of humour.