Hi all,

I am willing to maintain this project on my own free time. Drew told me
that he didn't want to be involved anymore and advised me to fork.

I don't know if many people will be reading this but I'll ask anyway.

This is a request for comments on the following open questions:

- What would be the name of the fork?

  Drew is OK if the original project name is preserved.

- Where would source code, issue tracking would be hosted?

  It will depend on the comments here. I do not have a paid account on
  SourceHut so I might be missing features to host it on my own account.
  I have a private owned server that can be used for small hosting
  needs. We could also consider other public source forges.

- What will happen to aerc-mail.org and #aerc, #aerc-dev on Libera?

  I don't know. I think Drew is the owner of the domain. Same for IRC
  channels.

- What to do with downstream packaging?

  Linux distributions that package aerc would need to be notified of
  the fork and adjust accordingly.

I will wait a few weeks for replies before doing anything.

Cheers,

-- 
Robin

On Fri Oct 29, 2021 at 2:02 PM CEST, Robin Jarry wrote:
> I am willing to maintain this project on my own free time.
Great news! :)

I wish I could help, but I have no actual technical knowledge.

Regards,

>
> --
> Robin

On Fri Oct 29, 2021 at 2:02 PM EST, Robin Jarry wrote:
> - What would be the name of the fork?

What a great opportunity for us to pick a better name! If you're not planning any major design changes, I would say stick with the same name.

> - What to do with downstream packaging?

The biggest benefit to keeping the name is that existing users will get your bugfixes with little hassle. (just upgrade existing package, not having to retrain muscle memory for new command name).
The fork will probably catch on with downsteam maintainers, given the status of ~sircmpwn/aerc.

> - Where would source code, issue tracking would be hosted?

Somewhere which can be used by terminal-based browsers and supports patches over email.
(Presumably there are alternatives to sourcehut with these features?)
Possibly you could apply for financial assistance for sr.ht,
or have an existing user (who you trust) give you read/write access to their repo on git.sr.ht.

> - What will happen to aerc-mail.org
Probably Drew's site will stick around for a while. We'd want to make our own site for the successful fork.

-Zach

Zach DeCook, Oct 29, 2021 at 18:00:
> What a great opportunity for us to pick a better name! If you're not
> planning any major design changes, I would say stick with the same
> name.

Yes, I don't see any benefit in spending time to find another name as
long as Drew is OK with it.

> Somewhere which can be used by terminal-based browsers and supports
> patches over email. (Presumably there are alternatives to sourcehut
> with these features?)

I am not aware of public source forges with mailing list support (even
less to handle patches...). However, I do not have any strong opinion
about the way contributions are made: pull requests, merge requests,
plain text email, patchwork, as long as the project lives and that the
community is happy :) 

> Possibly you could apply for financial assistance for sr.ht, or have
> an existing user (who you trust) give you read/write access to their
> repo on git.sr.ht.

Is there some kind of "non-profit" program on sr.ht? I could start with
a free account and see where it leads. I am not comfortable with sharing
accounts.

-- 
Robin

On Fri, 2021-10-29 at 12:00 -0400, Zach DeCook wrote:
> On Fri Oct 29, 2021 at 2:02 PM EST, Robin Jarry wrote:
> 
> > - Where would source code, issue tracking would be hosted?
> 
> Somewhere which can be used by terminal-based browsers and supports patches over email.
> (Presumably there are alternatives to sourcehut with these features?)

cgit can be used via lynx. I imagine that aerc is small enough for your
server, but if not, you could sign up for one of the tildes[1]. Many of
them offer cgit hosting, and the tildeverse has a communal mailing list
service.

1: {https,gopher,gemini}://tildeverse.org


Cheers,
-- 
DJ Chase
They, Them, Theirs

> - Where would source code, issue tracking would be hosted?
>
> It will depend on the comments here. I do not have a paid account on
> SourceHut so I might be missing features to host it on my own account.

I would really be in favour of staying on sourcehut as I prefer the patch+mailing 
list approche and I find sourcehut's UI/UX to be one of the best I have come across. 

If it helsp, I have a paid account and I wouldn't mind helping in mainting aerc. 
(Or even juste hosting the project on my account - I have a paid account 
mostly as a way of supporting sourcehut so I won't get rid of it anytime soon)

Also when the organisations feature is implemented it would probably be a good idea 
to use that as the cannonical repo for the project instead of one of the maintainers.


> - What will happen to aerc-mail.org and #aerc, #aerc-dev on Libera?

If Drew is not interested in working on aerc anymore maybe he might be 
inclined to give us the irc channels (I assume it is possible to transfer those)

>I am willing to maintain this project on my own free time. Drew told me
>that he didn't want to be involved anymore and advised me to fork.

Good news!

>I don't know if many people will be reading this but I'll ask anyway.

A few of us. In fact, there was an user who also wanted to keep aerc
up-to-date applying patches and whatnot.

>- What would be the name of the fork?

I don't think a change of name would matter. You could keep using the
same name (as far as your email says, Drew is alright with that).

>- Where would source code, issue tracking would be hosted?
>
>  It will depend on the comments here. I do not have a paid account on
>  SourceHut so I might be missing features to host it on my own account.
>  I have a private owned server that can be used for small hosting
>  needs. We could also consider other public source forges.

The ideal would be to keep using sourcehut. To be honest, the idea of
sourcehut is to provide an alternative to the GitHub-like workflow using
git as intended, that is, email+patches. It can be difficult when
starting with that, but I'm sure you can keep the pace.

If you don't want to keep it in sourcehut, at least put it somewhere far
from GitHub and GitLab, like Codeberg.

>- What will happen to aerc-mail.org and #aerc, #aerc-dev on Libera?
>
>  I don't know. I think Drew is the owner of the domain. Same for IRC
>  channels.

Why would it happen anything to those channels? Nobody said you cannot
keep using them for aerc development even if you're not the owned :)

>- What to do with downstream packaging?
>
>  Linux distributions that package aerc would need to be notified of
>  the fork and adjust accordingly.

That is if you keep the name, otherwise you might have to pack things
for GNU/Linux distros, or ask for someone who knows how to do that to
help with the project.

--

On a note, if you intend to keep using sourcehut, maybe you don't need
to "fork" (copy) the project and modify it but keep using Drew's
repository for the development, because he could give access to you to
it if you're really willing to keep aerc maintained.

Cheers!

Financial aid is available for those who cannot pay for a sourcehut
account, send me an email off-list to address it.

It's not necessary to transfer the channels right away, you can just
keep using them. Same for the mailing lists.

The basic idea is to give you a space in which you can develop the fork
and earn the community's trust without having to necessarily provide a
stranger with the legitimacy of being the official fork until they've
earned that trust. You're free to use the existing tools to accomplish
this.

Hi all,

Drew DeVault, Oct 30, 2021 at 09:32:
> Financial aid is available for those who cannot pay for a sourcehut
> account, send me an email off-list to address it.

I can afford to pay for a sourcehut account. I'll leave this for others
that actually need it. Thank you for considering anyway.

> It's not necessary to transfer the channels right away, you can just
> keep using them. Same for the mailing lists.
>
> The basic idea is to give you a space in which you can develop the fork
> and earn the community's trust without having to necessarily provide a
> stranger with the legitimacy of being the official fork until they've
> earned that trust. You're free to use the existing tools to accomplish
> this.

OK, That should help to get started. I have created a fork here:

https://git.sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc

My initial goal is to try and address the pending issues:

https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2

And have a look at the patches that still seem relevant:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/patches

Cheers,

-- 
Robin

On Fri Oct 29, 2021 at 5:02 AM PDT, Robin Jarry wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am willing to maintain this project on my own free time.

Excellent news! I've been interested in continuing development of this
project as well, but didn't want to commit to maintaining it due to time
constraints. Now that you've decided to maintain it, I'll probably be
sending some patches your way! I'm not an expert on the aerc codebase by
any means, but I've contributed to it in the past, so hopefully I can be
of some help.

I'm especially interested in fixing some bugs and improving support for
the notmuch backend, offline mail access, and UX.

> My initial goal is to try and address the pending issues:
Good idea. I'll try to address some of them when I get some spare time.

Kalyan

Hi Kalyan,

Kalyan Sriram, Nov 01, 2021 at 08:47:
> Excellent news! I've been interested in continuing development of this
> project as well, but didn't want to commit to maintaining it due to time
> constraints. Now that you've decided to maintain it, I'll probably be
> sending some patches your way! I'm not an expert on the aerc codebase by
> any means, but I've contributed to it in the past, so hopefully I can be
> of some help.

I'm glad to hear that. The codebase is rather easy to follow but is
lacking comments and commit logs to explain some key elements :-) If
I have specific questions, I'll throw a bottle on the mailing list.

At the moment, I am trying to get my head around this issue:

https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/266

Cheers,

-- 
Robin

> Linux distributions that package aerc would need to be notified of
> the fork and adjust accordingly.

The maintainer of Arch AUR package (which builds from the latest Git
commit) is notified of this, so hopefully they will move to fork soon.

On 4 December 2021 5:12:07 pm IST, Ivan Oleynikov <ivan.oleynikov95@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Linux distributions that package aerc would need to be notified of
>> the fork and adjust accordingly.
>
>The maintainer of Arch AUR package (which builds from the latest Git
>commit) is notified of this, so hopefully they will move to fork soon.

And update from my end too: I had already uploaded the fork version 0.6.0 in Debian. It has even migrated to testing.

[1]: https://tracker.debian.org/news/1280620/aerc-060-1-migrated-to-testing/

Thanks,
Nilesh
-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.