Let’s start a community-maintained fork: Sabattier

[zeorin]

Hello all,

The last commit to this project was over 3 years ago. At the time of writing this, there are 140 open issues, and 70 unmerged pull requests.

There’s even a bug that makes certain text invisible: #220, but fixing it would mean adjusting all applications’ dependent colorschemes, too.

Solarized is not only included as a pre-installed palette on e.g. Ubuntu, but it will likely soon be the default palette for their new terminal

This can’t last. I’ve been mulling over the idea of creating a proper fork that essentially fixes all the issues and merges the pull requests and will maintain this colorscheme into the future (because, despite its problems, it’s awesome).

I propose the following name: Sabattier. With a wholly new name making backwards-incompatible changes and/or changes that require changes in colorschemes that depend on Solarized much easier to handle.

But I really don’t think a bus factor of 1 is such a great idea. Are there any other people who really love this colorscheme that would like to not see it become irrelevant and would like to participate in such a fork?

(I've also mailed @popey and @jounih of Canonical’s Convergent Terminal project to see what they think).

[greg0ire]

Have you asked to become a maintainer of this project?

[zeorin]

@greg0ire I have not, but @altercation has not responded to many mentions in the issues. I don't know why, but I assumed that he's not willing to engage with the community (and I'm not judging, either: these things happen).

I don't want to be a sole maintainer, either. The application colorschemes would be too much for me to handle. Hence my proposal for a community fork.

[greg0ire]

@greg0ire I have not, but @altercation has not responded to many mentions in the issues. I don't know why, but I assumed that he's not willing to engage with the community (and I'm not judging, either: these things happen).

Sometimes, people don't respond because they have given up on reading their notification. Maybe you can find him on twitter, or find his email address in a commit, and shoot him an email?

don't want to be a sole maintainer, either. The application colorschemes would be too much for me to handle. Hence my proposal for a community fork.

The first thing you should do if you become a maintainer is look for new maintainers. If you can find some co-maintainers in this thread, then maybe write a grouped email. I'm sure @altercation would be glad to see his project live on and handle the keys.

[greg0ire]

If you don't think this can happen in real-life, see https://twitter.com/greg0ire/status/765486041209966592 and schmittjoh/JMSPaymentCoreBundle#165

[zeorin]

@greg0ire OK, I will engage @altercation in other channels (e.g. email, twitter), once I have some indication of people that'd be willing to become maintainers.

[greg0ire]

If you don't find any, you can count on me! This is far from being my speciality, but I have experience maintaining open-source projects (reviewing PRs, writing contribution guide, and other meta issues). It would just be better to have more specialized maintainers.

[zeorin]

@greg0ire Is there a polite way to message or notify the authors of the outstanding pull requests and ask them whether they'd like to become maintainers? I'm considering mentioning this discussion in the comments of one pull request per pull requester, but it seems spammy.

[greg0ire]

Maybe ask the top contributors by mail instead?

[altercation]

Trevor and I have already been discussing some options to resolve this and are working on it.

[TrevorBramble]

@zeorin, @greg0ire: look for more very soon. we're not happy with the situation either and have been looking at possible solutions in recent weeks and want to make changes as soon as possible.

Thanks for your interest and patience.

[webfella]

Any update on this? I just had to setup a new laptop and forgot about all the annoying workarounds.