Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Retiring Guilt

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:

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.

1 Comments »

  1. Thanks for Guilt! I still use it (almost) every day, and I find it to be the best way to prepare a series of Git commits. Except for trivial commits, I use Guilt for almost all commits I create.

    I'm really sorry to see it is no longer maintained. On the other hand, I'm really happy that it is so stable that it needs very little maintenance.

    Comment by Per Cederqvist — August 8, 2022 @ 12:42

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