I'm a bit out of the loop, is there an article explaining the death and rebirth of jq development, alluded to in the release notes?
114 points by drewda 62 days ago | past | 27 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951830
* jq 1.7
434 points by wwader 25 days ago | past | 206 comments
Which leaves us with the RC release candidate Announcement:
After a five year hiatus we're back with a GitHub organization, with new admins and new maintainers who have brought a great deal of energy to make a long-awaited and long-needed new release.
and the 1.7 release Announcement:
It's been almost five years since the release of jq 1.6. Recently we have had a great influx of contributor and maintainer energy. We now have 12 maintainers (up from 3), with about 4 or 5 active maintainers (up from 0), we have 8 admins with several active admins, and several owners at least two of whom are active. As a result the project will not again have such a long hiatus.
Either any dirty laundry is well buried or (more likely) this was simply a case of the original implementers hitting some plateau of achievement and fading away leaving JQ to eventually be picked up by others.
Others would have to chime in, I have nothing I can add.