Taking over xdg-utils

[Piotr Karbowski]

Hi,

On 01/01/2020 06.43, Simon Lees wrote:
> 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.

I wanted to go back to this topic. We still have a lot of issues and
merge requests on xdg-utils, was wondering if we could actually move
forward with some process to get things done, like, if rewrite is the
way to go, get a roadmap and commit access so we could get it done.

What's your view on that?

-- Piotr.