Hi Ladislav, I completely agree with your reasoning and conclusions. Historically, the sigrok project had a division of labor that mostly worked but I'm genuinely struggling to find a way that works for everyone (including me).
The two core issues for me are that libsigrok's architecture is fundamentally outdated and that it is *impossible* for me to review and merge changes to libsigrok device drivers. Why? Because I lack both the time to perform in-depth reviews and I lack the hardware to test changes against regressions. On the architecture side, it would make way more sense to spend time on rebuilding libsigrok so people can write device drivers in languages other than C - python or rust, for example. While logic analyzers likely need the performance, a lot of other drivers do not. That's why libsigrokflow was born to have a gstreamer-like data pipeline that is as flexible and powerful as can be. Unfortunately, we never got very far because it requires forking the gstreamer core library and modifying it to suit our needs - while Covid-19 hit soon after. So what's needed from my point of view? - People who can perform PR reviews on drivers and give me a thumbs up or down on whether to merge or not. - People who can help me prepare releases by summarizing the commit changes since the last release. I started making such a list for libsigrok but it just takes too much time I can't justify spending at the moment. - People who look at the open PRs and let me know which PRs should be included in the upcoming releases and which can be omitted for now. - Someone who is willing to spend some time with me to conceptualize a way forward in terms of gradual changes to the project architecture and document it on the wiki. Individually, all these things can be done by myself, sure, but the amount of work is just too much when taking it all together since I need to focus on project infrastructure first. In short: yes, I want sigrok to continue and be successful but it's way too much work for me to do it on my own. After the server crash earlier this year I kind of burned out and need to get back into things. Thanks for giving me a push by writing your message. Cheers, -Soeren On Thu, 2025-10-09 at 14:58 +0200, Ladislav Laska wrote: > Hi all! > > It's sad that sigrok is not receiving much attention and I understand > the original maintainer(s) might not have the time or interest to > continue development. However, the project still works great for many > use cases and there are a lot of PRs open on github, many of them > reasonably new - currently being ignored and authors demotivated. > > I think the community should offer a helping hand with the project and > offer at least some basic support in running the project. Depending on > how the original authors want to be involved, I think it would be a good > idea to appoint some community maintainers (ideally somebody who > contributed in the past) and give them enough privileges to merge PRs > and potentially release new versions. Alternatively, people could > volunteer to review & test PRs -- I'm up to looking into some, but it is > unclear if it would lead to something, since not even some simple ones > are being merged for around a year. > > What is the general sentiment about this? Is there a will to help keep > the project running from the community & current maintainers? > > I hope we won't let the project just die, since it's a crucial piece of > opensource software in the embedded engineer's toolbox. > > Best regards, > Ladislav > > > _______________________________________________ > sigrok-devel mailing list > sigrok-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sigrok-devel _______________________________________________ sigrok-devel mailing list sigrok-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sigrok-devel
