Dear Jörg Wunsch, first: Thank you for your contribution to AVaRICE and maintaining it. It seems you took offense in my previous email, which was never my intention. I'm sorry for that.
A new release would be greatly appreciated. The one-liner patch I posted does not apply to the current SVN head and the bug is already fixed there. So a new release would solve that issue and other issues and I would be really grateful for that. I still believe I have a point in both suggestions (Fixing indentation by running astyle/uncrustify/clang-format/... and moving AVaRICE to a different code hosting platform). Let me elaborate on why the code hosting platform is more relevant than it seems: As you said, AVaRICE would greatly profit from attracting new contributors. In order to increase the chance that other contribute the choice of a hosting platform (and also VCS, as you brought that up) can have a huge impact. E.g. let's assume AVaRICE would move to GitHub: - About 6.5 times more coders already have an account there [1], so it's more likely that they stumble upon AVaRICE by chance and end up using it and hopefully contributing to it - Most of the computer science students that attend one of our courses already have experience in using git, but few have experience using subversion - The effort to contribute is quite low on platforms like GitHub, GitLab, ... - Also, the effort to maintain is quite low on those platforms and the burden of maintenance can be distributed Summing up: The project would be more public and visible, so that more people get the chance to contribute. Also, the bar to contribute would be significantly lowered, as potential contributors are more likely to already know the tools and the process of contribution is more streamlined there. So while changing the code hosting platform does not address any of the actual issues, it might lead to others contributing important improvements. Regarding the search of a new maintainer of AVaRICE you mentioned: Maybe the OpenOCD guys are willing to adopt AVaRICE? They would have the expertise required to maintain it. Also maybe integrating the code of AVaRICE into OpenOCD could be an interesting long term goal, which would solve the problem of too few active contributors, as OpenOCD seem to have an active community. (And OpenOCD is hosted on SourceForge, so no code migration would be required.) Another suggestion regarding the maintainer is to ask big users of AVaRICE. E.g. RIOT OS is using it to debug the Arduino Mega 2560. They might not have the same expertise regarding debuggers as OpenOCD (as their main competence is writing an IoT operating system), but they certainly have the infrastructure and expertise required for maintaining open source projects. And for users of AVaRICE (RIOT OS or others) have a natural interest in keeping AVaRICE running. I'm really interested in having an open source tool for OCD of AVR MCUs. Sadly, I neither have the expertise regarding debuggers nor the time to provide significant contributions. However, I am willing to contribute any bugfix and improvement that I program in order to keep AVaRICE running for the OCD of the platforms I'm working with. Maybe, if others do the same those minor contributions add up. Kind regards, Marian [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_hosting_facilities#Popularity ------------------------------------------------------------- M.Sc. Marian Buschsieweke Dept. Communication and Networked Systems (ComSys) Institute for Intelligent Cooperating Systems (IKS) Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg Universitätsplatz 2, Building 29, Room 314 39106 Magdeburg Germany http://www.comsys.ovgu.de/Team/Marian+Buschsieweke.html Tel.: +49 - 391 - 67 - 52673 Fax: +49 - 391 - 67 - 41161 ------------------------------------------------------------- On Tue, 10 Jul 2018 22:08:46 +0200 Joerg Wunsch <j...@uriah.heep.sax.de> wrote: > As Marian Buschsieweke wrote: > > > My point is: SourceForge.net is a platform that really scares me away from > > an open source project, no matter how cool it is. Other coders and potential > > contributors may feel the same way about it. Maybe with teahub.io a good > > alternative will (hopefully) emerge some day in the (hopefully) not too > > distant future. Maybe that is worth for AVaRICE to look into, when it > > becomes available? > > Seriously, AVaRICE has bigger problems but its hosting platform or > indentation style (or VCS, in case anyone's asking for Git now ...). > Sourceforge hasn't been my decision, I merely inherited the project > that way, but for just distributing the software, it doesn't matter > much anyway which platform it is lying on. > > So far, there are *zero* active developers, plus a number of things > that require a rewrite of larger portions of the code. Namely, the > entire handling of the AtmelICE (and JTAGICE-3 in HID mode, as well as > all the embedded debuggers of the various Xplained boards) is just > alpha quality, and could be considered flakey at best. This is way > more important than stylistic things (as important as they might be to > you personally), because it affects the core functionality of the tool > for the only existing current Atmel debugging hardware. > > I don't have the time to do anything on it, sorry. I can probably > merge the current patch (which is a trivial one), and I could also be > willing to just roll out a new release if needed, but that's it. > > If there's anyone going to jump in, who wants to *seriously* (and > long-term) maintain AVaRICE, it would be their decision where to host > the project (or just keep it on SF.net). They are then also free to > migrate to the VCS they feel most comfortable with, and to fix > stylistic issues.
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