‼️ Future of the SparkleShare project · Issue #2006 · hbons/SparkleShare (original) (raw)

Hello contributors to and users of SparkleShare!

You probably have noticed the lack of activity on this project and you'd be right. Due to work, personal reasons and other interests, I no longer have the time or motivation to maintain the SparkleShare project.

Currently there are many problems that I don't have the energy for to solve. It's going to take an effort to even get the project back to build at this point because of the platforms shifting, let alone continue cross-platform app development.

On macOS: Visual Studio for Mac (which I've been involved in professionally) has sadly been discontinued.

On Linux the C# bindings for GTK are out of date and there doesn't seem to be much activity in the C# on Linux community anymore. The Mono Project is being replaced by the official dotnet implementation.

I don't have an interest in the Windows platform, which explains why the Windows release has always been lagging behind.

The final release tag will be 3.38.1. Though I will not produce any binaries for it. SparkleShare will remain available for Linux on Flathub and the Releases page will stay up. I will put this repository into public archive mode probably by next year. If someone wants to fork and rebrand the project, you have my blessing.

The notification service that has handling sync notifications between clients will continue running for a little while longer. After that SparkleShare clients will default back to polling mode, which makes syncing slower but it will still work.

I've been playing with the idea to take the project back to its roots, as I still think having an easy way to work with Git repositories is useful. Though this would be under a different project name/focus and smaller in scope. Possible a GNOME Circle-only project. Don't expect anything anytime soon and this is not certain to happen.

I'm grateful for all the contributors that have helped out in many ways and you have taught me a lot. Honestly I didn't think this project would get (relatively) big and used by so many people and organisations. At one point it was even the most starred C# project on GitHub (before Microsoft came along), which is crazy to think about. I poured my soul into it and it has been a great experience. Thank you 🙏

Hylke

(If you have any questions I will try to answer them below.)