What is the status & future of this library?

[alerque]

Please understand that I know how being the owner of Open Source projects goes, this is not a complaint, just an inquiry.

I've been using Penlight more and more in other projects and am running across things that either wouldn't be too hard to fix, or even already have been fixed in other people's forks and PRs. Looking at activity here it seems activity has stagnated for a long time.

I'm wondering what your plans are @stevedonovan: whether you would be open to more PRs, whether you might be open to letting other contributors join as maintainers, and/or whether I should perhaps consider forking. Please give a little bit of feedback about how you see the future of this library.

And of course thanks for the great library!

[alerque]

It looks like a lot of the more recent development work has been by @Tieske, I guess I should ping you too. Can you comment on the status of this?

[Tieske]

@stevedonovan ping

[stevedonovan]

Yes, I have been a neglectful father, but my current job leaves me with not enough bandwidth for such an important project. @Tieske is indeed the new maintainer.

[alerque]

Thanks for the reply @stevedonovan, and of course for again for this project.

So @Tieske same question at you. I see you are already a collaborator on this repo. Do you have access to the LuaRocks key to publish this? Do you have time an energy to push this forward some? What would be the best way to contribute?

I'm willing to help with issues, triage, and PRs — but it takes a maintainer on the other end of the line for that to do much good. If you aren't very available I can help out on the other end too. Please let me know how you see development progressing from here. Thanks!

[stevedonovan]

@Tieske LuaRocks is the key thing here .... how do I pass on the key?

[Tieske]

probably @hishamhm can help with handing over the ownership on LuaRocks.

[hishamhm]

Done!

[karlp]

As an outside user and distro packager, some wording on this in the changelog would have been appreciated. We've got a magically redirected url, but no news or feedback on why that's happened. Would it perhaps have made more sense to make a github.com/penlight/penlight? instead of moving to another user?

Further, https://stevedonovan.github.io/Penlight/api/index.html is still active, now with outdated documentation.

[alerque]

I'm going to chime in again and say I think @karlp has a point — moving this project to a dedicated org namespace makes a lot of sense. Doing this ASAP before everybody downstream fully adjusts makes the most sense to provide the last churn. This will make any future adjustments to the developer roster quite a bit easier.

And of course it would be great if we can redirect the old site(s) to whatever the permanent home of this ends up being.

And speaking of the developer roster, please note my question at you @Tieske is kind of still unanswered. I very much appreciate your getting the current code released and Luarocks up to speed with Github releases. That has made my own projects a lot easier to work with. And please don't take this as personal criticism of you because I know full well how time goes and that OSS projects often get the back burner no matter how much they interest us, but its been a month and some major outstanding bugs which have had fixes sitting around in open PRs for months still aren't taken care of. I would reiterate my offer to help maintain this if you are willing to add me as a collaborator. I understand why Steve passed off the responsibility to you based on past involvement, but it's also apparent that you don't have a lot of time to sink into it right now. There is still an offer to help on the table.

[Tieske]

@stevedonovan can you take down the old site? or add a redirect there?

@hishamhm how can I update the URL shown on the LuaRocks website? it also still directs to Steve's pages

[Tieske]

@alerque what important fixes are still open?

Mind that:

• the object model Penlight uses has some deeper issues with the self parameter
• the split behaviour needs fixing, but I'm weary because of compatibility issues

anything I missed?

[alerque]

@Tieske In particular #289 is a major bug that I code around quite often that has a pretty simple fix. I don't think the proposed fix will cause any regressions either except perhaps making code work that previously did nothing and the author's didn't even notice it wasn't working. It could break existing code, but not code that was working and not break anything that is the documented. It won't fix all the other deeper issues with self, but it's a start.

If nothing else the PR has received zero feedback from anybody maintaining this in 8+ months, and the OP is still active if something needs to be addressed in order to make it mergable.

[karlp]

I don't think #282 was what you were looking for?

[alerque]

Yes, sorry for the bogus issue number. #289 is what I meant, which is a PR addressing #288.

[hishamhm]

@hishamhm how can I update the URL shown on the LuaRocks website? it also still directs to Steve's pages

As the owner of https://luarocks.org/modules/tieske/penlight you can edit this data via the website. You should also edit the rockspec metadata by pushing a new revision.

(The website only reads the metadata from the rockspec when the first revision ever of a rock is pushed, afterwards edits should be made via the website.)