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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

I'll take the chance to bring attention to the maintenance issues that 'jq' has been having in the last years [1]; there hasn't been a new release since 2018, which IMO wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if not for the fact that the main branch has been collecting improvements and bug fixes [2] since then.

A group of motivated users are currently talking about what direction to take; a fork is being considered in order to unlock new development and bug fixes [3]. Maybe someone reading this is able and willing to join their efforts.

[1]: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/2305

[2]: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/pull/1697

[3]: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/2550

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What exactly is missing/broken in jq right now which warrants a fork? I've been using jq daily for years, and I can't remember the last time I hit a bug (must have been many years ago) and I can't recall any features I felt been missing for the years I've been using it.

For me it's kind of done. It could be faster, but then I tend to program a solution myself instead, otherwise I feel like it's Done Enough.

> What exactly is missing/broken in jq right now which warrants a fork

AFAIK there’s quite a few bug fixes and features that are accumulated on the unreleased main branch, or opened as PRs but never merged.

IIRC I hit one of the bugs while trying to check whether an input document is valid JSON.

I should try checking out what’s happening to the fork, I’ve never opened a PR or something but I’ve read the source while trying to understand the jq language conceptually, and I’d say it’s quite elegant :)

What I miss from jq and what is implemented but unreleased is platform independent line delimiters.

jq on Windows produces \r\n terminated lines which can be annoying when used with Cygwin / MSYS2 / WSL. The '--binary' option to not convert line delimiters is one of those pending improvements.

https://github.com/stedolan/jq/commit/0dab2b18d73e561f511801...

You’ll have a much better experience in Cygwin/MSYS2/WSL if you treat them like isolated environments and not call programs from outside of them. If you want to use ‘jq’ (or any tool) within Cygwin, install the Cygwin package. Don’t rely on the Windows install, and you’re guaranteed to run into problems like this.

I wouldn't say I need the program to grow with more features, but at the bare minimum they should have been more diligent with cutting releases after accepting bug fixes, instead of letting those contributions langish on the main development branch out of reach for users.

I mean it would be understandable if the maintainers didn't have the time to keep working on it at all, but clearly the review work was done to accept some patches so why not make .point releases to allow the fixed code reach users via their distribution's channels?

> It could be faster

A decaffinated sloth could be faster.

The README fir Jj points out how it is exponentially faster than jq. Presumably some of those improvements would help this.

Looks like it's because @stedolan goes silent and not delegating the right GitHub repo accesses to the existing maintainers.

He seems to be working at Jane Street though, so if anyone is able to reach him please help the jq community :)

https://signals-threads.simplecast.com/episodes/memory-manag...

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