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A living archive of _why's Executable Poetry

In August 2009, coding superhero _why the lucky stiff deleted all his repos, took down his domains and completely removed his online presence. Nobody outside of _why's personal circle knows why, but we're glad for the wonderful code he shared.

It's important that this code live on. We've mirrored what repos we could find, and like a scene from Spartacus, heros one by one have stepped forward announcing "I am _why" to ensure their continuity.

To those who are maintaining his projects, or submit patches or add documentation: thank you, thank you for your contributions. And to _why: so long and thanks for all the fish^h^h^h^h chunky bacon.

-- Flip Kromer (@mrflip / http://infochimps.org) and Seth Thomas Rasmussen (@greatseth / http://greatseth.com) for the http://github.com/whymirror project

More Info

If you're looking for any of _why's many non-programming artworks, please consult Jeremy Ruten's catalog: "Everything _why has published on the internet should be accessible from here. It works sort of like a museum that sells maps. Many of his abandoned writings are mirrored locally here, and everything else is through external links."

State of the Projects

All of these projects need two things: one or a team of people to take charge of the project, and people to help transfer the documentation. Anyone can help with the latter, so please get in touch with the maintainers to help.

Active projects:

• bloopsaphone : Sonic rangers mental and aberant will maintain this project. Check out the raucous susurration of commits on bloopsaphone from mental this week!

• blimlimb : Hero of the realm with honorary oak leaf bterlson will maintain this project, *and* is migrating the documentation.

• bumpspark : almighty bruce will maintain this project. Says Bruce, "This version is a modification of _why's (specifically it's not BMP, it's PNG, and it generates transparent images) from the various collaborators on the original post and some work of mine; I'll put this together as a separate repo, build out a gemspec, and add some tests."

• camping : This code will live at camping/camping, and expert scoutmaster judofyr heads a community effort to keep camping.

  He writes:

  “For Camping, we've created camping/camping which will be the “offical” repo. Also, I'm not going to be a 100% maintainer for Camping, but the community (mostly the people on the mailing list) will take care of it. See http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/camping-list/2009-August/001049.html ”

• 8cpj : Hollywood Upstairs Medical College alumn Dr Nic is going to keep on keeping 8cpj on.

• hacketyhack : Intrepid codesmith steveklabnik will maintain hacketyhack. AWESOME.

  The why-archive project has a recent version of hacktyhack, and needs to be reconciled with the http://github.com/whymirror/hacketyhack repo.

• hobix : This code will live at hobix/hobix, and man of mystery mental maintains this project. Man of mojo crnixon has volunteered to help: "I can get the online installer and site back up and running this week ... [and] continue to improve it in the spirit of _why." Awesomesauce.

• hoodwinkd : garrulous grifter robbyrussell will maintain this code.

• hpricot : elite greengrocers ecarnevale, olabini and crazycode will make sure this vital project stays fresh. Interested parties should contact ecarnevale regarding documentation additions to the wiki and other concerns -- i5m is to be thanked for his work on the thankless task of "fixing the hpricot wiki".

• markaby : With great enthusiasm joho, smtlaissezfaire and spox have volunteered to maintain this project. They'll let us know what the final team is. Spox writes, "It's a great library and I am starting to work on speed enhancements for it. I do not see any wiki materials that need to be transferred but I will be happy to start building one up as well as getting the issue tracker going for bug reporting."

• metaid : was recovered from http://rubyforge.org/projects/metaid by champions of the world dannytatom, evaryont and chneukirchen! Dannytatom is the head maintainer, and recovered the documentation to boot.

• mixico : Mixmaster rkh maintains this project.

• mousehole : Cool cat evaryont maintains this project. He's also recovered the documentation.

• parkplace : Defender of the crown mattjamieson is the maintainer of this project, encouraged by the legendary technoweenie. mattjamieson is also going to migrate the documentation from archive into the github pages. YAY

• potion : Master alchemist fogus is going to maintain this project, with assistance from breadmaster toastyapps. As wmorgan writes, "Potion is why's greatest work" -- check it out.

• redcloth : for some time, jgarber has been head of the Redcloth team (I accidentally included it on the mailings, sorry jason and all). JGailor and jbarnette will help transition documentation.

  yup has an old version of superredcloth captured from the code.whytheluckystiff.net SVN, if the redcloth project would like to adopt it. faithfulgeek has recovered the textile documentation from hobix.com and will recreate then github pages in redcloth if needed.

• sheila : is now part of the ditz project, but wmorgan will be the maintainer such as maintainer need be.

• sandbox (alt) and Try Ruby : Jedi masters parolkar and Sophrinix are recovering Try Ruby and its sandbox-shaped heart. Thanks to lsegal who recovered a bunch of sandbox code from svn. Once it's done, they'll post to comp.lang.ruby to get it linked from ruby-lang.org again. Try Ruby is a great project, please do what you can to help parolkar revive it!

• shoes : This code will live at shoes/shoes, where farrier to the stars mental will help maintain shoes with greatseth. The code will live at shoes

  A new mailing list and forums are up at http://groups.google.com/group/shoooes

  Join us in #shoes on freenode!

• syck : Hero of the realm indeyets maintains this project.

• unholy : Holistic healer devyn maintains this project.

• The perspicacious fogus has preserved chirrup , skistrap , fakeplus , processor , rb_parse_args .

Art and writings with open licenses:

• Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby : There are several repos, at poignant-guide, poignantguide, why-archive (broad archive) and poignant-br (brazilian translation). Please help reconcile them and identify the newest version, which is probably mislav's poignant-guide. They've also recovered the soundtrack and re-hosted on S3!

• Nobody Knows Shoes : andhapp is going to work to restore this documentation.

• Peter Cooper's collection of links to _why's prolific output catalogs several non-coding projects.
• Jeremy Ruten's catalog is even more comprehensive

Maintainer / Repo Needed:

• yown : Maintainer needed.

• These repos are being restored from SVN: (削除) chirrup, skistrap, fakeplus, processor, rb_parse_args (削除ここまで), greg, (削除) bumpspark (削除ここまで), myfs, railsfs, superredcloth, wordy. Once those are back up, smtlaissezfaire will answer requests for myfs and railsfs. The rest need maintainers, but due to their age and simplicity this should be a very easy task.

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/dns-zone/: If you have pulls (of any vintage) for this project, please create a github repo and message whymirror, who will fork your version.