Taking over xdg-utils

[Simon Lees]

Hi

On 12/31/19 2:55 AM, Piotr Karbowski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It appears that xdg-utils is dead upstream, handful of merge requests
> (mine including) rots waiting for comments/merge, no new commits being
> pushed to repo either.
> 
> I am considering forking xdg-utils and maintaining it for Gentoo, but it
> could be much better if I could maintain the original project, if no one
> else does, if possible so something beside Gentoo could benefit from it.
> 
> I am not sure to whom should I reach, I've mailed a few people who's
> commits recent in repo but did not got a single response.
> 
> So, xdg list, how can one take over supposedly dead xdg-utils
> maintainership?
> 

I am the maintainer for SUSE / openSUSE, i've only had commit access for
the last few months, but am working through some stuff, between other
work but given travel and some other stuff coming up in January I
probably won't get back to xdg-utils until feburary at the earliest.

SUSE has a "hackweek" once or twice every year where they allow
employee's a week to work on whatever projects they feel like, I believe
the next one will be in February. Currently i'm planning to use most of
that time to start working on porting the more complex parts into
python. Especially parts that deal with parsing desktop files and mime
database where there are already python libraries that can be utilized.
From memory there are some other corner case bugs that can't really be
fixed while using a posix compliant shell but that wont exist when using
python api.

At the same time there are parts of utilities like xdg-terminal that
make more sense and are much simpler in shell, so I suspect the answer
will end up being shell scripts that call out to python scripts that are
just wrappers around a library. An example would be functions like
desktop_file_to_binary etc.

In the shorter term I haven't really looked at the release process
because on openSUSE we have historically just taken "snapshots" from the
git repo when it suites us since before I was maintainer so I haven't
had as much motivation to look into what the official release process
has been. I'll also review merge requests that are easy to merge (I
should now atleast get email notifications for these and new issues). I
also need to take the hour to sit down and learn how to manually merge
commits with gitlab such as the one you have open. But i'm not sure i'll
get this time in the next couple of weeks. It will likely depend on how
I progress with writing the conference talk i'm working on. If I have
enough permissions and no one objects in the next week I can try and
give you some access although currently I only have "Developer" rights
not "Maintainer" rights and I haven't looked at the differences.

Cheers

Simon
-- 

Simon Lees (Simotek)                            http://simotek.net

Emergency Update Team                           keybase.io/simotek
SUSE Linux                           Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30
GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

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