Christian Hergert, the talented developer behind the GNOME Builder integrated development environment, the Ptyxis terminal emulator, and the GNOME Text Editor, made an announcement that he will be stepping back from GNOME development. This decision comes as a result of his relocation from the USA to France and a shift in priorities in his life. Christian, who dedicated over forty hours a week to maintaining and developing the GNOME stack, was almost the sole active maintainer of 16 GNOME modules. He explained that his new life in France will limit his ability to contribute to development as he focuses on his family and settling into a new environment.
The relocation to France was prompted by the new US immigration policy, given that Chris’s wife is from Tibet. Despite presenting Red Hat, his employer, with evidence of risks to his family, the company declined his request to retain his position after the move.
List of modules that Chris was involved in maintaining and developing:
- GtkSourceView – a library for multi-line text editing widget.
- Text Editor – the primary text editor of GNOME.
- Ptyxis – a terminal emulator used in various distributions.
- libspelling – a library for GTK spell checking applications.
- Sysprof – a profiling system that integrates with several components.
- Builder – an integrated development environment.
- template-glib – a template engine for GObject.
- jsonrpc-glib – a