abandonware and forks diverge wildly

[sorin-costea]

I can understand why a OSS project can go abandoned. But I can't understand how all the forks ignore each other... folk why can't you push your commits into other person's repo???

[mischak]

@sorin-costea which one ist the most promising / most up to date fork in your opinion?

[sorin-costea]

divebell or pontusvision as they committed more recently and probably still care about it?
(I can't tag people outside the conversation)

[mccartney]

FYI, I've reached out via email to @joestelmach, the founder to ask about his views on the project maintenance. No response yet.

[sorin-costea]

FYI, I've reached out via email to @joestelmach, the founder to ask about his views on the project maintenance. No response yet.

He's inactive on GitHub since 2017. I don't think you will receive an answer...

[mccartney]

Indeed, I did not receive an answer.

Suggestion - how about we create an "official" fork. I offer some time on my side to be part of the maintenance team - at least accept PRs, a bit of issue triage, etc.

By "official" I mean a dedicated Github org and artifacts published to Maven.

Who is in?

[bbottema]

@mccartney @mischak @sorin-costea, I don't suppose Joe replied yet? I find it odd how silent he became after his last Github commit in 2017. He works at Apple nowadays so I guess Java is not in scope anymore for him, but some form of interaction would have been nice.

So what was the outcome of the new 'official' repo? Is it this one?

Also, note that even though Joe's website is still up (heavily outdated from 2010), all Natty documentation is unreachable. The last working archived version is from june 2021. Too bad it never included a section on how to actually use it...

[mccartney]

Yep. I've recently started:
https://github.com/natty-parser/natty
I am in progress of setting up technicalities. Inviting everyone to contribute.

First version of the new artifact has been published. And soon I'd like to publish something that brings some new value.