Happy solstice, and happy Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day!

After my inventory of my code today, I have decided it's time to pass on moreutils to someone new.

This project remains interesting to people, including me. People still send patches, which are easy to deal with. Taking up basic maintenance of this package will be easy for you, if you feel like stepping forward.

People still contribute ideas and code for new tools to add to moreutils. But I have not added any new tools to it since 2016. There is a big collections of ideas that I have done nothing with. The problem, I realized, is that "general-purpose new unix tool" is rather open-ended, and kind of problimatic. Picking new tools to add is an editorial process, or it becomes a mishmash of too many tools that are perhaps not general purpose. I am not a great editor, and so I tightened my requirements for "general-purpose" and "new" so far that I stopped adding anything.

If you have ideas to solve that, or fearless good taste in curating a collection, this project is for you.

The other reason it's less appealing to me is that unix tools as a whole are less appealing to me now. Now, as a functional programmer, I can get excited about actual general-purpose functional tools. And these are well curated and collected and can be shown to fit because the math says they do. Even a tiny Haskell function like this is really very interesting in how something so maximally trivial is actually usable in so many contexts.

id :: a -> a
id x = x

Anyway, I am not dropping maintenance of moreutils unless and until someone steps up to take it on. As I said, it's easy. But I am laying down the burden of editorial responsibility and won't be thinking about adding new tools to it.

Thanks very much to Sumana Harihareswara for developing and promoting the amnesty day idea!