I’m Dead, We Have So Many Forks

The post title is something one of our kids said, years ago, when our utensils drawer contained the combined tableware of two adult households. They were spoiled for choice.

Anyway, since suddenly people I actually want to stay in touch with have started showing up on Mastodon and following me, I have started paying attention to the client app I use to interact with it. The original creator released it as open source and walked away, but it’s been picked up by a few people. So, I started feeding code updates back to the community. But, and here’s the first thing, which copy of the source code is the one that I should be feeding changes to?

Well, for now I guess the answer is this one. But wait, there’s this other fork that has a couple of features I like, but which has diverged substantially from the first. Also, all the UI stuff is done with storyboards, which I never really totally figured out, having started doing Swift development with SwiftUI.

But wait, there’s this library, MastodonKit, that wraps up all the Mastodon API stuff. Except it is missing a few bits, so there are other forks of it that implement the bits that other people care about. And there are pull requests to integrate those changes back to the main library but they’ve been sitting there, untouched, for a year or more.

Uh oh. Looks like we need some more maintainers. And a project. And a team. But gosh darn it, I’m not good at being an organizer!

Published by pirateguillermo

I play the bagpipes. I program computers. I support my family in their various endeavors, and I enjoy my wonderful life.

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