from Hacker News

Code Shelter: A Maintainer Community for Abandoned FOSS Projects

by rantanplan on 2/19/19, 3:39 PM with 76 comments

  • by entelechy on 2/19/19, 9:41 PM

    This is amazing!

    As one of the creators of a distributed package manager for C++ and friends [1] we made a funny discovery:

    Many C libraries that a big chunk of the ecosystem depends on, have not been updated for many years. Some of those can only be downloaded from sourceforge or ftp server.

    Even worse, some libraries are copy and pasted from project to project and have no actual home.

    We uploaded them to github and started maintaining them.

    If you know any abandoned C/C++ projects or C/C++ projects you need a hand in maintaining, we are happy to help.

    [1] https://github.com/loopperfect/buckaroo

  • by edzillion on 2/19/19, 8:29 PM

    You should set up an opencollective.com account (like Patreon for FOSS projects) - I would support this project and I am sure there are others that would too.

  • by mlinksva on 2/19/19, 8:25 PM

    Cool initiative. IIUC it lowers the cost of asking for and vetting help, which can be substantial. Moving a project to a stewarding entity even more so -- actually I imagine easily matching/getting new maintainers on board could ease eventually moving to a stewarding entity, eg Software Freedom Conservancy (which I volunteer for) requires accepted projects to have multiple maintainers from multiple organizations https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/ which is a giant leap for an unmaintained project. I believe other ~foundations also have extensive onboarding procedures/requirements.

  • by febeling on 2/19/19, 5:54 PM

    It's a great idea, and certainly much needed. I wish the name wouldn't imply as much misfortune and this sense of giving all hope up on the part of the original author. They have possibly toiled along for years. Some name that inspires a sense of honor and gratitude might be a lot more attractive to potential code donors.

  • by degenerate on 2/19/19, 4:48 PM

    The "add project" link on the FAQ page 404s: https://www.codeshelter.co/faq/ [fixed now]

    How would this project approach FOSS projects that were abandoned, then sort-of-picked-up by another maintainer, but with no actual continued development?

    Example: Meteorite MKV repair engine

    Original site: http://www.mkvrepair.com/

    Original code: https://sourceforge.net/p/meteorite/code/HEAD/tree/

    "New" code (last activity 3 years ago): https://github.com/abarnert/meteorite

    I would love to see this project continued, and even added into other FOSS projects like VLC.

  • by airza on 2/19/19, 5:11 PM

    This is kinda off topic, but how on earth did the team who took 300,000$ for light table end up foisting it off on volunteers?

  • by stevefan1999 on 2/19/19, 6:29 PM

    I admire your bravey in volunteering and investing your precious and finite time in researching million lines of code that was forgotten by the rest of the world that some of its mettle, perhaps was still enpowering the program we use day by day but underappreciated.

    Also, I think it's definitely a touching story to review how us evolve and obsolete code and algorithms, it's like a genetic and natural selection and we can learn from it to not let history happen again.

  • by colechristensen on 2/20/19, 12:30 AM

    I don't particularly qualify for maintainer as I have not been very active in open source, but I found a bit I could contribute to puppet-samba.

    I have more free time lately and a difficulty I have found is easily locating places I could contribute without a huge time commitment.

    For example I found some pretty minor changes needed to make testing work on puppet samba, it was a 15 minute task but helpful in any case.

  • by WrtCdEvrydy on 2/20/19, 3:04 AM

    This is kinda weird. I wouldn't consider tellform abandoned, but I guess it is.

  • by satoshinm on 2/20/19, 4:02 AM

    This is really cool, glad to see someone tackling this problem.

    I have added several of my abandoned projects, here is a quick summary of them if there is any interest:

    https://github.com/satoshinm/WebSandboxMC: Bukkit plugin providing a web-based interface with an interactive WebGL 3D preview or glimpse of your server - this bundles the NetCraft frontend in a Minecraft server plugin. There are requests from Spigot users https://github.com/satoshinm/WebSandboxMC/issues/100 to make it active again, which is what inspired me to add it to Code Shelter.

    https://github.com/satoshinm/NetCraft: Web-based fork of https://github.com/fogleman/Craft . Craft has been featured on Hacker News before, but it is pretty much abandoned, so I forked it into NetCraft, but then in turn ran out of time/interest to update it. The summary still applies: "Voxel game for modern web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux). Just a few thousand lines of C using modern OpenGL (shaders)." Heavily inspired by Minecraft, but much smaller and simpler.

    https://github.com/satoshinm/pill_serial: Triple USB-to-serial adapter firmware for flashing onto an STM32F103C8T6 "blue pill" minimum development board . With this firmware you can make your own USB-to-serial adapter, times three, by flashing a <$2 blue pill board.

    https://github.com/satoshinm/pill_duck: Scriptable USB HID device for STM32F103 blue pill (inspired by USB Rubber Ducky) . Another project for the "blue pill", this one lets you make an automated USB keyboard/mouse device, an imitation of the popular Rubber Ducky hacker tool, but a lot cheaper.

    https://github.com/satoshinm/pill_6502: emulated 8-bit 6502 CPU and 6850 ACIA for STM32F103 blue pill . Want to build a retrocomputer but an authentic 65C02 chip is too much? Play around with a classic processor without buying old hardware? Emulate it with the cheap blue pill, with enough support at least to run the Microsoft OSI BASIC ROM.

    I have started a few more abandoned projects on https://github.com/satoshinm?tab=repositories&type=source but these seem to have generated the most interest (especially the NetCraft/WebSandboxMC combination, but the pill_ projects can be quite handy), no longer can maintain them myself but would be great to see continued maintenance provided a community finds them valuable.

  • by dvh on 2/19/19, 5:28 PM

    Isn't this what's sourceforge is for?

  • by yeowMeng on 2/19/19, 7:50 PM

    Curious to know why the HN title is using `FOSS` but only mention of `FOSS` is on the site’s /faq page. For free software zealots, the sites tag line “... maintaining popular open source projects...” may not spur action as OSS is missing that required RMS approved F.