8 ms·

This might be easier to understand with some context. This is the GTK maintainer, who is about to release GTK 4 in a few weeks, and GTK 4 needs some unreleased

This might be easier to understand with some context. This is the GTK maintainer, who is about to release GTK 4 in a few weeks, and GTK 4 needs some unreleased fixes in Cairo. He requested a release earlier this year.[1] The last stable release of Cairo was in October 2018. A very simple merge request[2] submitted by Nikolaus Waxweiler two years ago has not been merged even though everyone agrees it is good because nobody has been willing to take the responsibility to approve it. The test suite is broken and tests were failing CI for all commits for a year (until the tests were disabled) because there was nobody who knew how the test suite worked who had time to fix it. There has been a proposal by a Google intern to add fuzzers for OSS-Fuzz to find security issues—but no maintainer has the time to review it. Yes, there are a few commits and merge requests getting merged here and there, thanks to Uli Schlachter who is still active, but this is a large graphics library with many, many features, used by thousands of applications. It is not finished and not in a good state. Web browsers and other applications that have resources to move to Skia have done so already; GTK probably will not have spare resources to do this. [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/issues/422 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/issues/422 [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/merge_requests/1 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/merge_requests/...

eggsome 6y ago
Oh well, I guess the custom terminal I commissioned for playing ADOM will need to be ported. Details and source code here for anyone interested: http://adom.brinkster.net/forum/messages.asp?thread=6420&start=62550&page=1&tmp=72806 http://adom.brinkster.net/forum/messages.asp?thread=6420&sta...
- sudeepj 6y ago
  Tangential: This is the 2nd time ADOM is mentioned in last 7 days by co-incidence on HN. It just makes me happy and I think it is heavily underrated game.
  - bensears 6y ago
    How would you compare ADOM to other rougelikes? (Nethack, DCSS, Angbad, etc.)
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      It was fun back in the day. I wish that the developer hadn't backed out of the promise to make it Open Source. Mechanically, it has moderate (though polished) depth. But it has more story and unique events than most roguelikes. It benefits far more than most from playing entirely unspoiled; there's enough information in-game to solve all its puzzles.
      - sudeepj 6y ago
        Not sure if you seen the latest incarnation: https://www.ultimate-adom.com/ https://www.ultimate-adom.com/ As far open sourcing the code is concerned, I remember the author said that it would open-up some secrets which players would otherwise will have to discover. E.g existence of "inn of the red rooster"
        JoshTriplett 6y ago
        > As far open sourcing the code is concerned, I remember the author said that it would open-up some secrets which players would otherwise will have to discover. E.g existence of "inn of the red rooster" I've heard that argument, but people have figured out the various mysteries anyway through reverse engineering. I don't think anything would be lost by opening it up.
    - chousuke 6y ago
      I haven't played ADOM since 1.1.1 (almost 2 decades ago) but I always found it more approachable compared to the alternatives I tried. It starts you off in an overworld and the initial progression is less linear than the traditional dungeon-delving approach of eg. Nethack and DCSS, so in that sense it feels more RPG-like. I never really got into Nethack much because it's just so punishing, and while ADOM is definitely far from an easy game, it felt better. DCSS is also similar to ADOM in the sense that the development community tries really hard to make it an enjoyable experience.
closeparen 6y ago
Why not fork it? The usual reason to upstream patches (aside from charity) is to offload the work of integrating them with future upstream changes. If upstream is not making changes anymore, what’s the problem?
- ilikepi 6y ago
  Perhaps the concern in forking it would be that the group that creates the fork now has the responsibility of maintaining another project, on top of the project(s) they already maintain.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    A part of me thinks that sounds like a fun retirement project, to become the primary maintainer of a useful but unglamorous OSS project; another part of me, looking at how my predecessors (already-retired programmers) apparently disagree, suspect that by the time I retire I'll either not want to deal with the burden, or have more fun things to spend my time on.
- kevincox 6y ago
  The problem seems to be the lack of maintainers. Assuming that the forker has enough trust why not just start maintaining the original project? Forking isn't necessarily bad, but it is often better to keep the "official" status of the upstream project unless it is necessary to drop it.
mjn 6y ago
> The last stable release of Cairo was in October 2018 Looking at the release history, as far as I can tell, every release since 2013 was rolled by Bryce Harrington, who at the time was employed with Samsung Open Source Group. Samsung shut the group down in... October 2018 [1]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-Open-Source-Closes https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-...
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  They still employed Enlightenment / EFL developers until a few months ago.
  - bokchoi 6y ago
    Ah, I'd forgotten about Enlightenment. Did Samsung give up on it? I am reminded of this wonderful post on thedailywtf: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      Money quote: "And did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?"
      - rjzzleep 6y ago
        I kinda like Tizen, but Samsung is really shockingly bad at open source. They assimilate and then try appropriate without building a community around it. Joyent public is kinda dead. There is a fork of SmartOS (Danube Cloud), which has far better documentation is much easier to run and actually runs in cheap DC environments like OVH and Hetzner and they have 2.5 active developers. Tizen is much better in terms of battery than Android Wearable and most other wearables, has pretty decent features, but is a complete mess to get applications on and there is hardly any third party using Tizen, let alone write documentation/tutorials on its development. All I know about Tizen is from reverse engineering my shitty Galaxy Active 2 with all the on launch promised features disabled if you don't use a Samsung phone and most of them released over a year after the original announcement. Most people on xda-developers say that it will be their last Samsung wearable. And if you look at the numbers Samsung wearables has crashed in sales.
gentleman11 6y ago
We need to get better at finding ways to pay people to develop foss. Micro transactions, Patreons, and industry groups are all good ideas. What else is there?
- hkt 6y ago
  I've always liked the idea of getting companies to sign up to second staff members for a month or two to full or part time open source work. They could get a nice friendly looking "open source supporter" badge for it, like the Fair Tax Mark. It'd take a small organisation being clever to do it but I think it'd work and free up lots and lots of hours of work to be done on valuable stuff.
  - kodah 6y ago
    If it were tax donation incentives I bet people/companies would do it.
    - hkt 6y ago
      Of course they would. But given the beneficiaries of open source software it would be hard to construe as charity, really. Just a bung to tech companies.
- rublev 6y ago
  Nothing will flourish under capitalism. Everything will be the husk of its original self after the vultures have picked off their share to allow it to even exist in any form. This is why most people do not even bother.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  The problem is people only pay for the cool and fancy stuff. Thats why projects like blender and krita are killing it while bluetooth audio and gui libraries are in such a dire state. Competitors have an advantage where you buy a macbook and the profits go to every single part and not just the eye catching features.
dredmorbius 6y ago
And more on the Cairo in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) (I still default to association "Cairo" and shftware with Microsoft, though there's also an Apple/Mac context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonts_on_Macintosh#Fonts_of_the_original_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonts_on_Macintosh#Fonts_of_th... ....)
sitkack 6y ago
GTK should vendor Cairo.

eggsome 6y ago

Oh well, I guess the custom terminal I commissioned for playing ADOM will need to be ported. Details and source code here for anyone interested: http://adom.brinkster.net/forum/messages.asp?thread=6420&start=62550&page=1&tmp=72806 http://adom.brinkster.net/forum/messages.asp?thread=6420&sta...

sudeepj 6y ago
Tangential: This is the 2nd time ADOM is mentioned in last 7 days by co-incidence on HN. It just makes me happy and I think it is heavily underrated game.
- bensears 6y ago
  How would you compare ADOM to other rougelikes? (Nethack, DCSS, Angbad, etc.)
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    It was fun back in the day. I wish that the developer hadn't backed out of the promise to make it Open Source. Mechanically, it has moderate (though polished) depth. But it has more story and unique events than most roguelikes. It benefits far more than most from playing entirely unspoiled; there's enough information in-game to solve all its puzzles.
    - sudeepj 6y ago
      Not sure if you seen the latest incarnation: https://www.ultimate-adom.com/ https://www.ultimate-adom.com/ As far open sourcing the code is concerned, I remember the author said that it would open-up some secrets which players would otherwise will have to discover. E.g existence of "inn of the red rooster"
      - JoshTriplett 6y ago
        > As far open sourcing the code is concerned, I remember the author said that it would open-up some secrets which players would otherwise will have to discover. E.g existence of "inn of the red rooster" I've heard that argument, but people have figured out the various mysteries anyway through reverse engineering. I don't think anything would be lost by opening it up.
  - chousuke 6y ago
    I haven't played ADOM since 1.1.1 (almost 2 decades ago) but I always found it more approachable compared to the alternatives I tried. It starts you off in an overworld and the initial progression is less linear than the traditional dungeon-delving approach of eg. Nethack and DCSS, so in that sense it feels more RPG-like. I never really got into Nethack much because it's just so punishing, and while ADOM is definitely far from an easy game, it felt better. DCSS is also similar to ADOM in the sense that the development community tries really hard to make it an enjoyable experience.

closeparen 6y ago

Why not fork it? The usual reason to upstream patches (aside from charity) is to offload the work of integrating them with future upstream changes. If upstream is not making changes anymore, what’s the problem?

ilikepi 6y ago
Perhaps the concern in forking it would be that the group that creates the fork now has the responsibility of maintaining another project, on top of the project(s) they already maintain.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  A part of me thinks that sounds like a fun retirement project, to become the primary maintainer of a useful but unglamorous OSS project; another part of me, looking at how my predecessors (already-retired programmers) apparently disagree, suspect that by the time I retire I'll either not want to deal with the burden, or have more fun things to spend my time on.
kevincox 6y ago
The problem seems to be the lack of maintainers. Assuming that the forker has enough trust why not just start maintaining the original project? Forking isn't necessarily bad, but it is often better to keep the "official" status of the upstream project unless it is necessary to drop it.

mjn 6y ago

> The last stable release of Cairo was in October 2018 Looking at the release history, as far as I can tell, every release since 2013 was rolled by Bryce Harrington, who at the time was employed with Samsung Open Source Group. Samsung shut the group down in... October 2018 [1]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-Open-Source-Closes https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-...

CameronNemo 6y ago
They still employed Enlightenment / EFL developers until a few months ago.
- bokchoi 6y ago
  Ah, I'd forgotten about Enlightenment. Did Samsung give up on it? I am reminded of this wonderful post on thedailywtf: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Money quote: "And did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?"
    - rjzzleep 6y ago
      I kinda like Tizen, but Samsung is really shockingly bad at open source. They assimilate and then try appropriate without building a community around it. Joyent public is kinda dead. There is a fork of SmartOS (Danube Cloud), which has far better documentation is much easier to run and actually runs in cheap DC environments like OVH and Hetzner and they have 2.5 active developers. Tizen is much better in terms of battery than Android Wearable and most other wearables, has pretty decent features, but is a complete mess to get applications on and there is hardly any third party using Tizen, let alone write documentation/tutorials on its development. All I know about Tizen is from reverse engineering my shitty Galaxy Active 2 with all the on launch promised features disabled if you don't use a Samsung phone and most of them released over a year after the original announcement. Most people on xda-developers say that it will be their last Samsung wearable. And if you look at the numbers Samsung wearables has crashed in sales.

gentleman11 6y ago

We need to get better at finding ways to pay people to develop foss. Micro transactions, Patreons, and industry groups are all good ideas. What else is there?

hkt 6y ago
I've always liked the idea of getting companies to sign up to second staff members for a month or two to full or part time open source work. They could get a nice friendly looking "open source supporter" badge for it, like the Fair Tax Mark. It'd take a small organisation being clever to do it but I think it'd work and free up lots and lots of hours of work to be done on valuable stuff.
- kodah 6y ago
  If it were tax donation incentives I bet people/companies would do it.
  - hkt 6y ago
    Of course they would. But given the beneficiaries of open source software it would be hard to construe as charity, really. Just a bung to tech companies.
rublev 6y ago
Nothing will flourish under capitalism. Everything will be the husk of its original self after the vultures have picked off their share to allow it to even exist in any form. This is why most people do not even bother.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
The problem is people only pay for the cool and fancy stuff. Thats why projects like blender and krita are killing it while bluetooth audio and gui libraries are in such a dire state. Competitors have an advantage where you buy a macbook and the profits go to every single part and not just the eye catching features.

dredmorbius 6y ago

And more on the Cairo in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) (I still default to association "Cairo" and shftware with Microsoft, though there's also an Apple/Mac context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonts_on_Macintosh#Fonts_of_the_original_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonts_on_Macintosh#Fonts_of_th... ....)

sitkack 6y ago

GTK should vendor Cairo.