Development of sabre/dav and related packages are indefinitely on hold

Hi there! My name is Evert, and for the past 10 years I've probably done around 90-95% of development for the sabre/* packages, and took over Baikal development last year.

After this time, it all became a little bit too much for me to maintain these. I wrote a blog post about this. This post is a follow-up that I'm cross-posting on both my own blog and sabre.io.

I want to start with a THANK YOU! So many people have written in with support and understanding, and told me about how these libraries have helped them out in the past. It was heartwarming and also bittersweet.

Support for sabre/* and Baikal

I was asked what's going to happen with future support for these projects. If you read my post, the only answer I can give you is: "I don't know".

I'm no longer doing maintenance aside from an occasional bugfix when I feel like it, but I'm no longer giving any guarantees. It's really completely up to you.

If you're a corporation and rely on the sabre/* projects, and you're also willing to invest in this, drop me a line. If there's a few businesses like yours, it might just be enough to setup a small foundation and hire a person to continue working on this and I'm willing to help in setting this up.

So far there's been no serious offers of this sort, so your best bet might be to understand the sabre/* source (it's not as hard as you think) and treat the same way as in-house developed code.

A few have offered to just pay me to work on specific things. I appreciate this, but one-off projects don't make a lot of sense for me and one of my biggest issues has always been finding time, not money.

For those of you that are developers and interested in taking over maintenance, I would just want to say: do it! You don't need my permission or blessing.

The packages are on github, you can submit pull requests and there's also lots of open, unanswered support questions. If over time the quality of your contributions is high, I'm super open to just hand over control of the repositories you're interested in.

Someone also asked "is there going to be a fork?", which I found a hilarious question to receive because obviously I wouldn't be very interested in this idea. If you're thinking of forking though, consider the fact that you can also contribute to the main project and benefit from the positive reputation the project already has.

Some small next steps

At this point I shut down the mailing list and the comments section on sabre.io. Support questions come in through both of these channels, and without anyone to monitor these, it seems better that they're gone. Go to github, there's more eyes there.

I'm also turning off github notifications for all of these projects. If you really need to get a hold of me, email me or mention @evert on github.

Perhaps in time someone else will post a happy update here announcing a new maintainer and renewed interest.

Until then, I'm sorry I'm letting you down and thanks to the hundreds of people that have supported me! Keep an eye on evertpot.com if you're curious what I'm up to next!