No, a white space error did not lead to my resignation

The standing joke about punishment with a commit bit is not specific to the FreeBSD Project.

Whatever a person's commitment, factors such as these must be weighed:

• pay
• pleasure
• prestige
• punishment.

— a sometimes difficult balancing act.

Phabricator sucks (YMMV), GitHub excels (particularly for pull requests that are not forced away from the FreeBSD organisation).

YMMV. FreeBSD aside: there's undeniably useful integration with BMO (example (not visible without logging in) (screenshot)) — and I have done enough with Mozilla, over the years, to know that Phabricator can excel for some types of review — however from my FreeBSD perspective, Phabricator sucks, and it sucks for multiple reasons.

Downsides of Phabricator, for FreeBSD, probably include:

• the absence of a simple routine through which doc tree changes can be properly proofread prior to publication.

The FreeBSD Documentation Project (FDP) Primer places great emphasis on this:

• ALWAYS build and review the changes before submitting them. Running make in the documentation or website subdirectories will generate the documentation in HTML format.

Is this generation possible, pre-publication, with Phabricator as a hub?

Whenever a published change to the doc tree introduces an error such as a broken link (example) it is, to me, a signal that the stated need to always do something has been ignored.

For posterity, 2023 captures of my profile:

• January — engaged
• mid July — disengagement (removal from eight areas, and an empty profile)
• 21st August — farewell, to my commit bit and all that went with it — so long and fanks for all the thish.

The July disappearance from all areas except (formally) the committers group was:

• my swift, silent reaction to things being pushed off-balance.

Before I formally resigned my doc tree commit bit, I found myself browsing last century's first edition of the Primer. Nik Clayton's first words (abstract):

❝ Thank you for becoming a part of the FreeBSD Documentation Project. Your contribution is extremely valuable. ❞

In his final commit to the tree, four years later, the author disentangled himself from the Primer, prompted by an O'Reilly Network article.

The article begins:

❝ Life is change: it's natural for people to get a life, stop their work on a software project, and for new people to take their place. … ❞

For me, the most relevant paragraph includes this:

❝ … often the right thing to do is to just do something, even if it's not perfect. …❞

My goodbye — so long and thanks for all the fish — was not to all areas of the FreeBSD Project.

GrahamPerrin#alum lists some of my post-reboot focus areas.