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Active development: is this repo abandoned? #789
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I am actively working on my fork of the project mostly just adding features that are asked for here that seem compelling. I really want to get stuff merged back here whenever the author returns. I would be happy to collaborate with others on a shared repo rather than my personal one. Then we could agree on a shared roadmap / refactor list. It would be great to commit effort in a common location with multiple maintainers to prevent future stagnation. |
@borgmanJeremy If it ever comes to the point of you making a separate fork, please call it HeatShot. I wonder how much time has to pass for that to happen, though. Judging by the number of GitHub stars and the fact that is a dedicated Linux screenshot tool, I imagine quite a number of people rely on this software. |
Looks like repo owner @lupoDharkael was active on GitHub on 2020-05-01, making the commit at godotengine/godot@38b1829. @lupoDharkael can you comment on your interest in maintaining flameshot going forward and whether you'd be interested in adopting additional maintainers here? |
I hope that all is well with @lupoDharkael. There are many forks of this nice application. Would it be possible to use one of the forks (for the time being)? I checked the forks, and most of them are just behind of this authoritative repository. There are 3 that stand out:
Would any of these be able to continue the development for the time being and provide an exe version of the flameshot? |
borgmanJeremy adds a circle counter https://github.com/borgmanJeremy/flameshot. Might be candidate too. The overall list is: |
@lupoDharkael has been tagged many times in the past in different issues here - unfortunately to no avail. He seems to be active on Twitter, though, so at least it looks like he's fine in these crazy times we live in. Maybe he is busy with other stuff - but owning an actively used repo also comes with some duties. At least adding some maintainers for handling all of these pull requests would be great. Alternatively, a comment regarding the future of this repo would be needed so the community can get a "Plan B" up and running... |
How about creating an "organization" on github, merge all these forks that @radoeka suggested and then give all these devs maintainer access? This way even if/when @lupoDharkael wants to work, he can. |
I'd be happy to get mine merged in. I'm currently working on clearing out some of the technical debt... Porting to cmake, fixing depreciation warning, etc Before merging to an organization we need to make sure all maintainers agree on the project direction. |
But, besides flameshot, there is also another nice screen capture tool. Perhaps all effort should be put into that one, being https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip This tool (ksnip) has for example the circle counter, and adding text to the screenshot just works, and it is (very) actively maintained.... |
@radoeka I don't see much of a difference is features that make me switch to ksnip. Also Flameshot looks much more convenient as used don't open a new window only to annotate the screenshot.
I personally think FOSS benefits from diversity. If we aggregate all the efforts around ksnip, we are putting all our eggs into one single basket (which oddly enough is also managed by one single person which can go dark and maintenance of that project also have the same destiny as this one). My vote (if it counts) is on giving Flameshot a chance by creating an organization and put multiple people as maintainer. We can elect one or two devs to also play the role of project manager, and we can have such election for example every half a year or so. Flameshot has 5.9k stars, 420 forks and 120 watchers, meaning we have enough voting population for such election. The license of Flameshot is GPL3 which allow us to adopt the code and form such organization and advance the project. |
@mmahmoudian I just wanted to have another possibility brought to light. I like Flameshot as well and it will be very nice whether it remains to exist. As such I agree with suggestion. I'm curious to see what comes out of this. |
+1, I think it would be nice to see |
Tweeted the following:
An organization sounds like a great idea. Should probably make sure there is no issue with keeping the name flameshot... With this I will unsubscribe from this issue, since it looks like this is now in more capable hands! |
Inspired by radoeka's comment, I did a little bit of scripting to get the general status of the forks. Here are the general statistics:
To see the general status of "diverged" and "ahead" forks I plotted the following: It is up to the community to consider including the diverged ones into the mix, but I personally suggest going with "ahead" forks. The following table is a list of Github users with a fork that is ahead of this (lupoDharkael/flameshot) repo and is sorted based on the number of commits. It would worth acknowledging that number of commits is a blunt metric and I was not able to extract the number of added and deleted lines fro each of these forks.
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When moving to another repository, think of what to do with the reported issues. Some of these might be solved due to new code in the repository, but it is probably not possible to close the issue. To make the move possible @lupoDharkael should refer to the other repositoriy... Or is that not needed? |
I'm no expert, but I think a referral to the new repo would officiate the migration, but if we had access to @lupoDharkael or if he was responding, we wouldn't have needed to take such route and migrate to a new repo. Also for packages in distros we would face some problem if they don't make their build from the new repo. I don't know what is the regulation or general practice for an abandoned FOSS under GPL3. Perhaps it would be nice if someone with some experience comment here. Similar situation happened to keepassx and it was abandoned for quite some time, and then some folks forked the repo and continued it under keepassXC which now has twice as much as the stars that keepassx has with a very active community. Perhaps we can ask Jonathan (@droidmonkey) and Toni (@hifi) what is the procedure in their experience. |
Is anyone else on here willing to be a maintainer of the project? I am happy to help with feature development and maintenance but the first task should be identifying the core maintainers and making sure they all agree on the project direction. I am personally interested in cleaning up technical debt before adding many new features.
I also do not really want to maintain release for every distro. It makes much more sense to me to target snap or flatpack to relieve maintenance burden. A large number of issues that are currently opened are solved by telling people to build it from source. |
@borgmanJeremy I suggest that people who have already worked on the code, those that have repos ahead of the original repo in terms of commits (e.g with at least 2 commits ahead), become maintainers and we as a community elect two people (in addition to @lupoDharkael) to lead the project. This repo has 120 watchers and 5.9k stars which means the election would be relatively fair. We can then have the election in 6 months and re-evaluate the activity of the lead maintainers as a community. I personally think that having largest number of commits is not a good metric for electing lead of dev, as the result I wrote a script that dug into the issues (open and closed) of this repo and looked for the number of times each of the devs I named on this comment have participated in the discussions. Then I made the following figure. I think the most ideal candidate should be on the top right corner of this plot and since no one is up there, we should go for the next best candidates. I thought to put the criteria to those who have commented at least three times or have more than 5 commits ahead of the origin (the 🔴 data-points). Feel free to discuss, comment, ... |
I could probably write a book on FOSS takeovers at this point 😵! I know nothing about this particular project, but here are some generic pointers from our experience:
Logistics note: we originally forked the Keepassx repository, then quickly created an organization and asked GitHub to break the "Fork" to make us standalone. Best decision made early on. P.S. - After reading the README, if this project can be deployed cross-platform I could use this instead of Snagit. Fully support this effort! |
@mmahmoudian That seems like a good starting point. Droidmonkey had some really good advice so I am okay going forward with this at this point. Anyone have good name suggestions? Thats always the hardest part :) |
My nomination for the new name is still Heatshot, it received a few likes over here so why not. It's aligned with a list of suggestions made by @droidmonkey. Allow me to explain how I came up with the name in the first place:
Of course, this is just a quick mockup. This also alleviates the need for making the new logo.
Name, logo, website
I just want to avoid one person having keys to everything. It happened here and in many other open-source projects that are much bigger than Flameshot. A notable example that comes to mind is Solus distro. It might feel like I'm needlessly overcomplicating things but I believe it is best to sort these types of things early and avoid trouble later. ANYWAY, I put forward 2 names:
//EDIT: I don't want to create an unnecessary reply, @mmahmoudian suggestion to use GitHub pages makes sense and it is perfectly adequate, somehow it slipped my mind we can just use simple static page and be done with it. Scratch the idea about the website/domain for now. |
@droidmonkey Thank you for your kind input. You made some valid points some of which I've never thought of 👍 @LeBaux Thanks for enlightening me. I used to use FireShot (good ol' days) but somehow my brain didn't make the connection between "Flameshot" and "Fireshot" 🤦 . Regarding the domain/hosting, to keep things simple, we can use the Github pages that provides xxxxx.github.io domain as well. This way we would have a working website and yet no one owns the domain or hosting and we also cut the costs. I used to use Solus and I was a huge fan (still am but have lost some weight. Imho it was a shame that ikey's went dark for some time). Anyhow, I think any registered domain should technically have an owner (person or organization) and since one person scenario might not be a good idea for obvious reasons, and we don't have an organization, I suggest we move forward with github.io concept for the time being. Perhaps the project can later join KDE, Gnome or any other organization. For collecting Ideas I would suggest creating two new issues in this repo, one for name and one for logo, and give everyone one week to post their suggestions as comments. At the end of the week we can have a poll and have the final verdict. If you agree with this approach, give this comment at least 5 🚀 reactions and I'll create the issues and start the one week time. (The reason for 5 is that there are 9 participants to this thread and |
For the (new) name: a combination of screen/monitor, screenshot should do => perhaps moonshot (monitor + screenshot)? To me it sounds cool ;) For the name think of a nice url as well, for example something ending in; .fun .hot (flames.hot), .joy, .monster (flame.monster), screen.ninja, .lol, .spot, .you. .pics, .wow, .zone. Nice idea to open issues to decide on the name and logo. Let's try to get in contact with @lupoDharkael for ~ 3 more weeks, till 1 September? With Github readme pages, it is possible to make a nice interactive page, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECuqb5Tv9qI |
Someone using Twitter (I don't) could try there... |
@Rmano From his paypal donation page, I managed to get his full name ("Alejandro Sirgo Rica"), but I couldn't manage to find his twitter account using his Github username or his name. Do you know his Twitter ID? Also while googling, I found a fork of flameshot tha is not on github and is one commit ahead: |
Lupo_Dharkael |
I wrote him a message on twitter. Unless I reply here, assume he never got back to me. |
Hi! sorry for the (long) delay. I'm happy to let the community continue my work but I'd need help about choosing who to trust first, a lot of people has this software installed and it is my responsibility to satisfy the trust they put on me choosing to install my software. |
@lupoDharkael Thanks for replying here. It's good to know that you are safe, and also it is good to know your priorities and concerns. If folks here don't mind, I reiterate what I have suggested previously and people in this thread showed support on the idea, it might be a good idea to take the project into a github organization in which you can have the development leading role as well as one or two people who know the code and share the same vision with you in terms of where this project goes and what are the milestones. From there after, the website can be a separate repo in the same github organization and can have its own journey as a repo. To assist with who have showed the competence of pushing the code further, I did a bit of analysis on the issues and the forks to get a short-list of candidates that can collaborate with you in maintaining the project and developing it further. Of course this is just a numerical quantitative preliminary analysis just to bootstrap the whole thing. I believe you can even start a Gitter (or Discord, Element, or what ever platform) room to get to have small chats with some of these devs and the community in order to share your concerns and we can get to a sustainable solution for such an amazing FOSS project. You can also go with the route of creating a poll and let the community choose the maintainer dev (hopefully based on their previous contributions, PR and etc.). Such poll can happen annually or bi-annually to keep up the spirit. Discourse can also be used to have the feature requests more organized if needed in later stages. |
Some more data: Forkslogin ahead_by Contributorshttps://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot/graphs/contributors Active issue responders (according the graph of @mmahmoudian)borgmanJeremy Active in this issueborgmanJeremy From this issue; it would be nice when mmahmoudian would be able to step in, and help lupoDharkael to make the transition to an organization possible. From the list above it would be nice when borgmanJeremy would be given access to the repository to help out with the code. |
Meeting detailsI think it would be time to read the results from the forms as everyone who wanted to participate would have done it already. The call does not have passwords and it is considered as public event. Anyone can join the meeting to participate or listen. I added a few of the timezones here for participants' convenience: Please make sure to familiarize yourself with: General results of the pollsThe detailed result of the Google form is available via the following spreadsheet (as readonly): |
@mmahmoudian very good development. To all meeting participants, make it a good and successful meeting. |
I change #732 to provide an artifact via appveyor. So the exe should be available for the next 6 month As for maintaining the repo further, I would be down to help. |
@MadddinTribleD Join the call as explained here. The least you can get is to get to know what has been discussed, and in the ideal case you will get to know firsthand how to effectively contribute. |
Am I right that the call has already passed? |
No. |
@pavel-the-best No it is in about 7.5 hours. The call will be at "2020.08.19 16:00" UTC time and the current UTC time is: https://time.is/UTC To avoid cluttering this thread, I would suggest contacting me via twitter @mmahmoudian if you think your question and its answer would not be useful to others. |
Ah, I see, thanks. |
I'd appreciate if we could have another one next week (probably 27 or 28 of this month), I wasn't able to be at a computer with internet for the first one. I have to stay out of home a lot so it is hard for me to attend a webcall before that date. |
Quick question @lupoDharkael -- could you pin this issue? It might more effectively clear up things. |
Hi folks! Unfortunately @lupoDharkael wasn't able to attend the call. General discussions and roles
Agreed course of actions:
Potential contributors list
TL;DR
Hope we all together will restart development of this project and make it best in class 😃 💪 |
As @lupoDharkael suggested, I created another webcall poll to find the proper time (The time is in UTC): To help you choose the time I made this custom link to convert timezones: I will also post the link on public Slack workspace for flameshot. @lupoDharkael would you please pin this issue so that others can find it easily on the issue page |
Based on the current responses to the poll, it is definitive that the meeting will be on 2020.08.28 sometime between 16:00 to 20:00 UTC time. Let's wait until end of tomorrow (2020.08.25 23:59 UTC) to give others a last chance to participate in the poll so that we can have more participation from the community. Then on 26th if there were still more than one suitable time, I will ask people on Slack's Flameshot channel about the most preferred time and then I announce it here and also on Slack's announcement channel. @lupoDharkael although we know both 27th and 28th are suitable for you I would be thankful if you can mark the times that are suitable to your schedule. For everyone's convenience, here is the current state of the poll: Please join the Slack for discussions and updates. |
@lupoDharkael could you please join the slack and vote in the time selection poll? |
Hey @lupoDharkael, I personally think you should transfer repo maintainer rights to one of the people in the thread (probably @mmahmoudian or @StyleT) right away without the extra pressure of meetings and deadlines on your shoulders. You seem to have enough of that already. I understand that you want to ensure quality in the future but tbh. you let that argument slip for a while yourself. Nobody profits from a fork! Trust the community approach and we take all responsibility off of you. P.S. |
@mmahmoudian contacted me outside of github and we talked about this project at length. He urged me to attend the calls because my topmost priority is keeping the FOSS spirit of the project. We share this particular interest when it comes to flameshot. My enthusiasm and energy quickly faded when my dad was diagnosed with ALS (no need to comment on this, I don't want to derail the discussion). And that brings me to my point. Life happens, priorities change. It is normal. Personally I would prefer if @lupoDharkael stayed and served as sort of a "board of directors", giving the project oversight while leaving the daily duties to folks who have time and motivation. But there should be always 2-3 guys in charge who are reachable and can keep the project and each other in check. My 2c. I feel we might be pressuring lupo too much, especially because every other comment mentions forking flameshot (I was part of the problem) and sometimes even making 2 clicks is a struggle. Or opening a link from an email. Everybody who experienced depression/anxiety knows this feeling all too well. Development is halted for almost a year now, so let's not suddenly make this a problem that needs to be solved in matter of days. Thank you. |
As promised, after the poll I figured that the date is clearly settled to be 2020.08.28 but there are more than one available time that is suitable to everyone participating. On Slack I asked if anyone has any preference and based on the voting I would like to announce that the webcall will be held at 2020.08.28 17:00 UTC using the same Jitsi meeting link. Please feel free to join the call even if you have not participated in the polls. I will create the meeting room about half an hour beforehand in case anyone wants to join and have off-topic chat or test the audio and etc. ☕ Hopefully see many of you in the call. Let's have a casual and fun discussion about this amazing piece of FOSS. |
Hi everyone! I came back from my travel. See you tomorrow in the webcall 👍 |
The webcall took place and it served to decide the new route of the project. I'm going to move Flameshot to an organization and add 2 new contributors. They will start working on small things such as fixes, fixing build system and repo management. I'll be monitoring their work so I can see how they work and what they do. That way they can earn my trust. |
@lupoDharkael Most of the discussion is done in Slack |
Just to keep everybody up to date:
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Awesome, thanks a lot everyone involved - and also for keeping us posted! :-) |
The last commit dates back of 10 months.
Seeing 350+ open issues and 50+ pull requests, I guess there's no other authorized maintainer other than the author.
Are there good forks under active development out there?
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