Why the next Hobbit release hasn't happened yet

[Henrik Stoerner]

Note1: There's nothing Hobbit-technical in this mail, so feel
free to just hit "delete" if that is why you're reading the
list.

Note2: A few people are receiving this directly; don't worry,
I haven't auto-subscribed you to the Hobbit mailing list. It's
just easier to write this only once.


I've received a couple of concerned e-mails over the past few days,
asking me if there was "something wrong" since I haven't done
any work on the Hobbit snapshots.

The answer to that question is "sort of", but nothing truly serious.

I guess I am just experiencing a mild degree of burnout(1)
regarding Hobbit programming. Several factors at my for-pay work
(I work for CSC in Copenhagen) have probably contributed to this;
there's been some downsizing and organizational upheavals, and
I've had to step in and support one of my colleagues who was
very close to collapsing with severe stress. Some people just
cannot say "no"; I can, and so I had to do some "no-saying" on
her befalf while helping her get the projects finished.

On top of that, I've had some vision problems the past 4 months.
Vision on my left is rather bad because of a severe case of
floaters(2), which will probably require some eye surgery later
this year. This is quite annoying when working with a computer
monitor, since the text appears blurred.

Another complication has been a legal issue. I've had some e-mail
exchanges with the people representing J.R.R.Tolkien / Lord of the
Rings; however, this has been resolved in an acceptable manner.
More on that in my next mail.

Also, I have chosen to focus some of my time on taking care of myself - 
in the beginning of this year I decided that I was getting a bit fat 
and started going to a gym. I've never done fitnes or sports of any 
kind (being the true geek that I really am :-)), and losing 30 lbs does 
take some time and effort away from other activities. Contrary to what 
some people claim, I do NOT feel more energetic after a two-hour 
workout; I feel sleepy. However, that project is proceeding as planned
and by the end of the year I should be in much better shape than I 
was at the beginning of 2008.


So what do I do now?


I feel that I've gotten some energy back and can start looking at
coding some again. I need to wrap up the current code so it is in a 
reasonable state for all of you to start testing. I'm on my summer 
holidays for most of August, and the weather forecast for next week 
looks like there will be plenty of time to stay indoors. So I promise 
to produce an alpha release within two weeks. Then we can start playing 
with it and see how buggy it is.

It would obviously be good to have more people involved in the
programming.  One roadblock for this has been that the source code has 
not been available in a public repository. That is about to change; 
I am working on setting up a Subversion repository for the Hobbit code 
on SourceForge. I am currently testing a dump/import of the RCS modules 
into Subversion, and if that looks to be OK I'll upload it to Sourceforge 
tomorrow. So by Monday, this should be available to anyone who wants to 
hack Hobbit. Documentation on how you use SVN (Subversion) on Sourceforge 
is available at SF(3).


One thing that has made me very happy is that the support available on
the mailing list apparently works quite well even when I am not around.
It is a great relief for me to see how helpful this community is; you
really are an important part of this project.


Regards,
Henrik



1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_(psychology)
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floaters
3) http://alexandria.wiki.sourceforge.net/Subversion+-+Version+Control+for+Source+Code