Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

So how come a fork was necessary?

youtube-dl has been inactive for the last 2 months.

Most things still work but support of different services is something that needs daily updates to not break. Even if most popular websites still work, pages like Newgrounds are breaking.

There's 3.7k open issues right now and nothing gets merged [0].

[0] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues

It's really stupid that this stuff still happens. I mean, youtube-dl main devs are stepping away, it's understandable. But it would be so much more convenient for everyone, if it was passed over to somebody, who is still interested (yt-dlp devs?) instead of ending up as a bunch of forks nobody knows about, and a dead project everyone continues to use. Just think about how many apps and scripts have youtube-dl hardcoded somewhere in them.

But still, why a fork? Why not contribute to the original project?

Why not ask for maintainership if you need it?

Asking is meaningless if nobody answers.

Devs on yt-dl have been inactive for a few months iirc

Does not look inactive to me: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/graphs/contributors

Jun 29, 2021 – Aug 26, 2021: 0 commits

It does look like there's little activity in the last couple months and none in the last almost 2 months.

For longer than that. 846 open PRs, 3.7k open issues. And this long predates the GitHub takedown debacle. This isn't to say that they're totally AWOL: they do a really good job keeping on top of the boring break/fix work, like keeping on top of the ever-changing interfaces of video providers. But they're very conservative about expanding functionality, and even fixing more minor bugs.

And they've closed many issues as duplicates with no further explanation given:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/23860

Have they been duplicates?

The linked issue contains several issues describing the same problem, but what I meant to say was that which duplicate they were of was never made clear. The maintainers seemed to assume that everyone knew what it was and never provided a link to the original issue.

Wasn't the repo taken down for a while?

Yes, but it was brought back on November 16, 2020, and there was plenty of activity after that, till this recent drought of dead air.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com