Josef “Jeff” Sipek

It took me about 3 years to write this post. Partly because I had other things I wanted to work on and partly because I hoped that it wouldn’t be needed. Well, I finally decided that I really need to write this.

In short, I’m officially stopping work on guilt.

Practically speaking, I haven’t touched it (as a developer) in over two years and as a user in about as long. So really, nothing will change.

What is guilt?

I started writing Guilt in fall 2006 because I was working on unionfs and needed to maintain patches on top of the Linux kernel git repository—much like what the mq extension did with Mercurial repositories.

It all started with:

commit 664e5a7d7f8d2c2726f03a239de11fa00127cf84
Author: Josef Sipek <jsipek@thor.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu>
Date:   Mon Nov 6 13:08:30 2006 -0500

    Initial commit

That’s right, 14 years to the day.

Technically, the first few versions were called “gq” (which stood for “git quilt”) until someone pointed out that “GQ” was a well established GTK-based LDAP client.

Artifacts

If anyone wishes to resurrect this project, then by all means go for it. If not, the old content will remain online for as long as I have a web server. :)

Specifically, you can find everything up to and including the last release (v0.37-rc1) at the following locations:

• HTML manpages: http://guilt.31bits.net/man/
• Source tarballs: http://guilt.31bits.net/src/
• Git repository: https://repo.or.cz/guilt.git (mirrored at https://github.com/jeffpc/guilt)

Users

I know that Guilt has served a number of people quite well over the years. It’s been quite stable and mostly feature complete since at least 2008, so I haven’t really been hearing from people short of the occasional patch or an occasional “oh yeah, I use that”.

To those users: I hope the last release works well enough for you until someone starts to maintain Guilt again or you find a different tool that suits your needs.