Welcome to the 36th edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.
This edition covers what happened during the month of January 2018.
On January 29th Johannes Schindelin, alias Dscho, announced Shawn’s death on the mailing list. He had learned about it from a tweet by Chris DiBona.
Chris’ post after telling that “Shawn Pearce, author and committer and/or founder of Git, Jgit, libgit and Gerrit has died, stricken by an aggressive cancer” points to a “Shawn Pearce Memorial Fund” on gofundme, but mostly asks people to join him in missing Shawn.
Jeff King, alias Peff, wrote a “Remembering Shawn Pearce” post on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog.
Luca Milanesio, director of GerritForge and one of the maintainers of the Gerrit project, also wrote a post called “Shawn Pearce: a true leader”.
Dave Borowitz, leader of the Gerrit project, informed the Gerrit community on their discussion forum, too.
On the Git mailing list, following Dscho’s email, as can be expected in this kind of circumstances, people expressed a lot of emotions, like sadness, shock, sorrow and gratefulness. Some outlined how important and significant his contributions were. Then a small thread started about making “some sort of tribute to Shawn at the upcoming developer meeting in Barcelona”. Even if it is not clear from the thread what kind of tribute will be made, developers were supportive of the idea, and something will very likely happen around the upcoming Git Merge 2018 and associated Contributor Summit on March 7-8 in Barcelona.
Just before the closing talk of FOSDEM 2018, “the world largest conference of its kind”, on February 4th in Brussels, a big round of applause was given to Shawn.
Shawn had been interviewed in Git Rev News edition 30 published last August. He was also mentioned in 9 other editions, especially in edition 11 in an article about “RefTree”, an alternate ref backend that Shawn proposed and in edition 13 in an article about a Resumable clone based on hybrid “smart” and “dumb” HTTP, another proposal from Shawn to significantly improve Git.
Various
Light reading
Git tools and sites
Listening and Watching
This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Gabriel Alcaras <gabriel.alcaras@telecom-paristech.fr> with help from Luca Milanesio, Edward Thomson and Johannes Schindelin.