The future of this project

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 06/12/2017 05:41 PM, Dominik Ruf wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> this mail is overdue, but I always hoped it would get better. :-/
> I know this is a community project and we all have other 
> responsibilities. So I understand that a request does not get answered 
> instantly.

I understand and see your frustration.

Not that it really answer your questions, but for what it's worth, some 
comments to your examples:

> But for example my pull requests about 'repository settings' is now 
> literally waiting for YEARS.

Yes. Also, the latest changesets in the PR still say WIP, suggesting 
that it not really is considered ready yet. The previous iteration got 
review feedback 2 weeks ago. I haven't had time to follow up on the 
latest one, having spent time on ...

> Or lately my 'Port Kallithea theme to Bootstrap' pull request. I asked 
> multiple times for some feedback, but since 2 MONTH I got nothing. I 
> understand that reviewing takes time, but at least some kind of 
> comment is not too much to ask.

Bootstrap has been very hard to land. Mainly because my initial requests 
for splitting things up with clean history so they were reviewable were 
refused or ignored. I have thus spent a lot of time trying to 
extract/redo and land parts that I could review and so I knew what was 
changed and why. The latest iteration of the Bootstrap PR is much better 
and we are making progress - thanks!

> And some pull request like 'catch MemoryErrors when calling git diff' 
> are really trivial.

Unfortunately, I also have the feeling that the approach in that PR is 
wrong. If we push the system so much that we get MemoryErrors, the 
system might start swapping and other things might fail too. Instead, we 
should make sure we don't use crazy amounts of memory but fail 
gracefully. But I haven't had time to investigate and propose a better 
solution.

> This can not continue in this way. This project is now almost 3 years 
> old and we have very little to show for ourselves. In fact there were 
> questions if this project is actually alive (can't find the link right 
> now). And I can't blame anybody to think so. Kallithea has improved 
> very little. Version 0.3 is 20 month ago.
>
> So my questions to you guys is this:
> What are your future plans for this project?

My plan is to keep improving it, as contributions, time and priorities 
allow it.

> Are there any chances that this project will start moving more quickly?

Yes, if more people help by adding more resources and by helping us 
utilize resources better.

Contributors can help reviewing, testing and improving contributions 
from others to the point where they are willing to put it in production 
right away and support it long term.

Code contributors can also help by following the contributor guidelines 
and structure the code changes in such a way that they are easy to 
review and maintain.

/Mads