Correct, Read the Docs isn't going away, and maintainers certainly don't need to worry about moving their documentation. We'll just be switching hosts before the end of the year.
We actually got hints of the fact that Rackspace was axing their F/OSS program back in May, and have been slowly prodding folks in the Python community about sponsoring hosting since then. Rackspace never confirmed if/when the program was going away, but we were anticipating this since their acquisition.
To answer these questions, I think you need to be talking to these companies that you think would/should donate. Finding out what they want or need (from you or DBIx::Class et al in the coming year) is most important. Maybe their budgets are frozen until EOY, maybe you need more time to allow for purchasing, or maybe you aren't providing enough tangible benefits to justify bringing this to their management -- all questions you could uncover.
I would say that companies need more tangible benefits here, they can't justify a feel-good purchase price of $6-12k. I don't think you'll get into marketing budgets with an ad buy on your laptop. I know it's not part of the Perl community to create a website for your library, and it likely wouldn't have the impressions needed to attract any marketing interest either way, so maybe that's the wrong angle.
If DBIx::Class et al are integral to these companies, offering more options for support retainers at lower levels might justify the spend for more companies in the middle ground.
Anyways, I don't know the answer here, and I'm going through the same problems myself. I think you need push forward with all courses of action (save giving up early). Widen your pool of possible contributors, talk to those possible contributors you have a relationship with, and give it some time.
There is no access to Sphinx's directives/extensions, as it implements Commonmark support, which doesn't yet offer an extension syntax as part of the spec. Once it does, writing in Markdown will me more useful, but currently it's limited to basic markup and naive linking.
It's worth mentioning the besides the steps for requirements installation, this workflow isn't limited to Python. Sphinx has support for writing referential documentation with many other languages. Integrating with per-language tools to provide automatically generated reference docs is something we're starting to build out more with https://github.com/rtfd/sphinx-autoapi, though it's still in its early stages.
Similarly, if your modules are that popular and causing enough of a support burden to result in resentment, maybe this is a signal of an opportunity?
If your code is popular, why not offer support to, or seek out sponsorship from, the companies that are using your modules/applications? A revenue-focused startup is probably a bad resource to tap for this. But getting a few companies to spread out a few hundred dollars each from their engineering/marketing budgets isn't completely unlikely.
Otherwise, you can always recite the age-old mantra to cleansing open source entitlement resentment: "Patches welcome."
It's not clear if you are asking about Homebrew or Macports. If you're asking for a Linux wrapper around Macports, I think you've found it. If you're asking for a cross-platform build system, NetBSD's pkgsrc (http://pkgsrc.org) supports Linux -- though there is no pkgsrc Homebrew equivalent that I know of.
Has anyone heard anything from Moniker, or the other registrars claimed to be hacked? I wasn't able to fetch the registrar data from the zine release, and haven't found another source, though it had sounded like HTP obtained root or privileged access on Moniker.
I haven't heard anything from Moniker. My trust for them has be waning for a while, and radio silence on this doesn't help -- though I haven't attempted to reach out to their support at all either.
You should look into a tool that stores meta information on the backup files, such as rdiff-backup. Manually restoring ownership/permissions from a backup is probably tiring.
Also, the added benefit of avoiding social distractions helps a great deal. I know I'll be able to sit down by myself, with my morning coffee, and have several hours of highly focused hacking.
I would definitely agree that to progress with any endeavor -- entrepreneurial or creative -- requires critical analysis of your work and yourself. If you are not focusing on your flaws, then you are likely skipping steps necessary for improvement.
Though, I often find myself at the opposite end of this spectrum. I tend to focus foremost on the flaws in my work, and because of this, I do hate much of my own work and I have dissuaded myself from any further attempts. I would say a certain degree of persistence is equally as important as maintaining a critical point of view.
We actually got hints of the fact that Rackspace was axing their F/OSS program back in May, and have been slowly prodding folks in the Python community about sponsoring hosting since then. Rackspace never confirmed if/when the program was going away, but we were anticipating this since their acquisition.