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Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

This is all MIT licensed, if people care so much, why has nobody forked this? Why are people talking about jumping ship to a completely different project instead of forking and cutting a new release from there?

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It looks like 1.4k people have forked it. The question is, which fork do I use? The problem is not that the source is unable to be updated, the problem is how to you organize peoples' efforts under a trusted maintainer long term? How do I know which forking effort to trust?

My understanding is that that's kind of the point of groups like the "Python Packaging Authority". So if they're not going to merge pull requests and do maintenance on the project, that IS a problem, since they're supposed to be the official version right now.

Alternatively, they could add one of those 1.4k people in to help if they seem to have produced working code for the project prior.

Github forks are meaningless. Sometimes they're forked because people think it's the same as the "star" button. Sometimes it's to have a classy project show up on your profile. Sometimes it's because you want to submit a PR. Sometimes it's because your company requires a software but isn't willing to use the public mainline.

Doesn't mean that at least one of those people doesn't actually maintain their forks and do PRs to the project.

Most of those people aren't maintaining forks in any meaningful sense.

There are over 500 commits merged to master since the last release. The community is actively contributing but these changes don't get to the end user because the maintainers are not releasing them.

Bugs get reported and closed because they are fixed in master every day, wasting not only the end users time but also that of the people actively working on the project.

> The question is, which fork do I use?

Return the forks of developers who have publicly stated they'd like to take over maintenance of this project.

I'd bet that narrows it to less than ten.

Now-- have a look at the blog posts where these maintainers explain their plan to sustain the project going forward and choose the most persuasive one.

I'd bet it's less than one.

Short circuited, problem solved. :)

PIL -> Pillow

pipenv -> pippi

They could call it pippi

The problem is the name, not the content. There are lots of guides, blogposts, etc which say “use pipenv, is awesome”. However, if one actually tries to do this, as the bug says, one gets a very old release with seemingly no chances for bugfixes, etc..

This means a bad experience for people who try to use it, and makes whole Python ecosystem feel a tiny bit worse too. Imagine a frustration of someone reading the blog post , spending all the time learning about system, using it, and then discovering bugs won’t ever get fixed!

It is very easy to fix by an author: just a small, 4 line commit to readme and website saying “the project is dead , go elsewhere”. This will allow people to move on - maybe to a fork, or to some other project which does similar thing.

There's 1400 forks. I'm sure that people will move to one of them if the original is pronounced dead.

The question is who will have access to make new releases on the Python Package Index. Otherwise, they'd have to find a new name for their fork.

That normally means there have been 1.4k pull requests not 1.4k people actively maintaining forks.

Title and comments in that issue thread show that people misunderstand how the FOSS works. Maintainer is not 'the project', it's the current direction that shapes incoming pull requests.

This viewpoint doesn't account for authenticity as verified by, e.g., PyPi. Yes, you can use anybody's pipenv, but most people would greatly prefer to not go to such lengths.

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