paramiko
New: OSS project roadmap
Fri, Sep 24, 2021 | announcements, fabric, invoke, paramiko

Just a quick note that there is now a roadmap section on my projects page. I’ll be linking to this from the project websites ASAP.

My hope is that this goes a small way towards addressing the thing where my reduced cadence makes it look like projects are “dead” when they’re actually just sleeping (cue Monty Python parrot reference here).

HELP WANTED
Thu, Jul 2, 2020 | announcements, fabric, invoke, maintainership, paramiko

The first step

is admitting you have a problem; so with that in mind:

Hi. My name’s Jeff, I maintain several OSS projects you may be familiar with1, and I’m burned out.

I lie awake at night, unable to sleep, crippled by guilt. During the day, it’s anxiety and fear that cripple instead, making the thought of facing the issue tracker unbearable.

Development on my projects has slowed far more than I ever intended, and while I have excuses2, push has clearly come to shove. Something must change.

Unstable ground, or: the problem with bugfix releases
Sat, Dec 15, 2018 | maintainership, paramiko
Intro When it comes to software maintenance tradeoffs, most of what I laid out in “The why & when of software releases” remains accurate. An ‘iron triangle’ exists between speed, stability, and ease of maintenance – it’s impossible to prioritize all three. I historically prioritize stability, specifically via bugfix-oriented release branches – users can stick to a given minor version even after subsequent feature releases appear, with the implied contract that they can install updates from those branches without anything breaking. But as I’ve burnt out, I lean more towards ease of maintenance (at least when push comes to shove) though I still do my best to backport fixes anytime it’s easy enough. Today’s post is about a specific conflict between stability and ease of maintenace, as seen in my efforts to drop Python 2.6 and 3.3 support from Paramiko. That is not dead which can be eternally supported Paramiko 2.0 came out in spring 2016, heralding a switch of crypto backend from PyCrypto to Cryptography (though no API incompatibilities were introduced). At the time, my commitment to Python 2.6 was still firm, despite slowly decreasing support elsewhere. By late 2017, the combination of a vastly shrunken 2.6 user pool and similarly decreased ecosystem support (in Cryptography especially) finally prompted me to drop it too, in Paramiko 2.