I almost feel like it’s October last year, when I pled for improvement on all fronts regarding the Kbin development strategy. Now it seems development has ceased once again and there hasn’t been chat on the matrix channels for over a week. Update: that’s two weeks now (including his blog) and over a month of no visible Development.

Update: According to https://fedidb.org/software/kbin there are a grand total of 29 active kbin servers. Of 61,489 users on all instances, 59,962 of these are on kbin.social. To those users I would like to say that should kbin.social fail, there will always be Mbin servers to fall back to.

What is going on?

We can only speculate, based on what has happened in the past. Several mind bending theories can come to mind.

Perhaps Ernest (and whatever team still exists) is continuing development in the background, not publicly sharing his work on codeberg. He may have had enough of all the criticism and wants to do it his way without interference. This may sound a bit far fetched, but he’s admitted in the past that he prefers concentrating on coding over communicating with his community.

Other theories could involve something bad involving Ernest personally, let us hope that is not the case. Ernest is a great person, nobody would wish anything bad upon him.

But in reality, speculation doesn’t change anything, we can only deal with the situation at hand.

I believe waiting for a new release comes with too many risks in the current setting. Nobody can monitor the code during progress or do any testing for themselves while development is ongoing (assuming it is). If anything, what’s coming next? Your guess is as good as mine.

A new version may well break compatibility between Kbin and Mbin. Mbin is trying to stay compatible with Kbin for as long as reasonably possible. However, staying compatible with something that is out of sight and out of one’s control is challenging, if not impossible. A break in compatibility would mean there will be no easy way to migrate to Mbin after an upgrade for Kbin users who have patiently waited for one, should they want to.

I would not want the future of my instance to be dependent of such a level of uncertainty, now or in the future.

  • Kata1yst@kbin.social
    9·
    10 months ago

    Why do you assume that? Why is your way of open source the right way?

    All open source projects are run by a small team of people reviewing and accepting, rejecting, and prioritizing work. What part of this project’s methodology bothers you?

    • TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.orgOP
      14·
      10 months ago

      Please prove me wrong, but I am interpreting this as a confirmation of my feeling that development is currently ongoing in the background.

      Open source and maintained in an obscure location do not go well together in one sentence. Perhaps if it had been like this all along from the start, so people knew what they were getting into. Taking OSS development offline whenever it suits one person, without any form of announcement let alone an explanation to the community, would bother me

      • Kata1yst@kbin.social
        5·
        10 months ago

        What obscure location? Codeberg?

        All the activity is open on Codeberg. You can see every member of that team actively merging and reviewing requests.

        • TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.orgOP
          21·
          10 months ago

          My point is that there has been no commit to Codeberg for a month. So, if development is still ongoing, it is being done somewhere else.

          • Kata1yst@kbin.social
            5·
            10 months ago

            Development is happening in the dev’s branches. Branches are generally kept local until submitted for a PR. You can easily see this in the origin branches and open PRs.

            Honestly I’m not sure if you’re trolling, don’t understand git development, or if you really think that a project needs to iterate main multiple times per month to be your definition of “healthy open source”, but I’m tired of shooting down such lazy attacks and won’t be responding further.

            Have a nice day.

            • TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.orgOP
              21·
              10 months ago

              I am very sorry but am not seeing any commits in any of the branches? I may be overlooking something.

              Update: sorry I did not read your reply thorougly enough.

              But even if that’s the case,

              Up to a month ago it was common to see commits in the development branch on a regular basis. So it may be a change of strategy, but even if so, it’s still without announcement or explanation.

              That last thing for me is the issue. It’s happened before, where Ernest left everybody dangling. Fair enough, he’s written in his devblog. But the community doesn’t know if any of that is based on reality and, sadly, due to things which happened in the past and given the circumstances, that makes me very skeptical