Project status

[FauxFaux]

Hi everyone,

I don't know what to do about this project.

First, let's look at the problems, then some proposals.

---

PuTTYTray is stuck at its current version of a number of reasons:

1. My use of Windows, and my motivation to maintain it, has dropped way off.

2. A number of PuTTYTray features I've never used have a very high maintenance cost.

adb support, and supporting config in files, are a nightmare. I doubt they even work as they used to.

Both should be dropping out of popularity, but I guess that they are not:

• Config files used to be a workaround for Windows having bad support for the registry as a limited user, and for carrying your config around on usb sticks. Both of these usecases have hopefully basically vanished, but instead we have people using Dropbox. Almost all bug reports are from people using Dropbox.
• adb integration into the IDE has become a lot better since they switched to IntelliJ as a backend, but I get the impression that many people haven't switched.

3. PuTTY upstream have fixed a number of my personal concerns.

I was always annoyed upstream didn't have signed binaries, and built PuTTY with a compiler from the 90s; that they didn't care about hardening or process-level security. All of these things have been fixed in the last year. They even moved to git!

4. I changed the development style to assist contributions, but none ever came, and it has ruined everything.

Back when I was young and naive (around three years ago), I changed PuTTYTray from a continually rebased set of patches into a continually merged branch.

I thought this would encourage others to contribute to the project. It hasn't.

This, in general, just does not work for a project tracking upstream. Especially not where the upstream does not want to be tracked, as is the case with Putty: they make things very difficult.

This is something I have learned recently looking at how Debian works. This deserves a whole blog post.

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Now, what can we do about this? Here are some options:

1. Repair the history, and continue releasing.

I could revert PuTTYTray back to the original development methodology, by going through and separating out all the changes back into patches. This would make it possible to work out more precisely how much cost there is in maintaining the "files" and "adb" code, and how much other stuff is just broken waste.

I tried to do this, and ran out of motivation. This is what's currently sitting in the master branch.

It's unlikely to get finished, ever.

2. Do a "limited release" with just the features that people in this ticket use, and then try and add others later.

This is less effort than the previous suggestion, as it doesn't involve deriving meaning from every line of code.

Currently, the feature list would be:

• URL clicking
• Embedded agent / keygen / etc.
• Probably: compiler changes

And these would go. Things at the top are easier to keep, I guess:

• Always on top
• Window transparency
• Tray icons and related functionality
• adb support
• files support
• all the other crap that has built up over the years

3. Someone else takes over the project.

If nobody cares about this ticket, or about my proposal above, then the project will remain dormant (unless I suddenly get the motivation to continue with "1", or the tooling / upstream improves to the point where it's easier).

It's happened before. It will happen again.

---

So.

• Who would be happy with the "limited release"?
• What other features would you want?
• Or is it better just to leave it dead?

If you have a particularly compelling use for any of the features not in the "limited release", please let me know. We're definitely not at the point where new features are going to get added at request, so don't mention those.

[xsak]

My 2 cents: I am ok with a limited release, but I would like to see the "Tray icons and related functionality" stuff in it.

[FauxFaux]

I have remembered that I like the "mousewheel to change font size" functionality, so that would make it in.

[T-O-W]

Hi!

First of all, I've been using PuTTYtray (together with VcXsrv) for several years now and I really appreciate your work.

I agree with xsak. A limited release would be fine. I like PuTTYtray because of a few small improvements over PuTTY, not because it has thousands of additional features. My favorite features are minimizing to tray (especially nice when running X11 apps) and the embedded agent/keygen. I've never used transparency and I have not even heard of adb. Storing the configuration in files is nice, but I never use it because I want to stay compatible with PuTTY. If this is really required, maybe one could add a registry im-/export instead of storing directly to files. But in my opinion, this does not have to be maintained. "Always on top" seems to be a nice feature, but I don't know when I used it last time.

[Ashus]

Hi.
I'd also like to see a new version with fixed things from upstream, even if it had limited functionality.
Here is a list of features heavily used by me:

• Tray icons (tunneling ports all day)
• Configuration in files (portability)

Thanks for the hard work.

Edit 2018-04-08: Saving configuration to files instead of registry could be simplified by porting source from http://jakub.kotrla.net/putty/ .

[Ximalas]

I only use PuTTYTray due to its URL handling. It made IRC endurable. Would upstream be interested in adding that feature? Is it impossible due to licensing? Automatic reconnect is also nice, when that worked properly. mosh has largely replaced my need for automatic reconnect as this is intrinsic in its design. Sadly, I'm only a mediocre programmer at best. Others have said it, but it's worth repeating, thank you for the hard work.

[vovcacik]

Hi,
thanks for sharing this with us instead of going abandonware. If the limited release would work for you I think it is the best solution.

Important features

• files support
  • this one is really all about the portability that also enables easy sync (rsync, unison, Dropbox) and backup
• Tray icons and related functionality
  • good for hiding many sessions/tunnels
• Confirm key usage
  • fifty fifty between my OCD and security :)

Nice to have

• URL clicking
• Embedded agent / keygen / etc.
• ~/.ssh/id_rsa support
• "Copy OpenSSH public keys"

Never used it

• Always on top
• Window transparency
• adb support
• cygterm
• Start with Windows

[Jadelor]

Would be ecstatic w/ limited release. My favourite things with PuTTY forks have been (in this order):

URL picker
good text antialiasing
visual bell in the taskbar icon
remembered window size/location

Though most omissions are workable-through for me.

Sad to hear the situation is like it is. I guess the writing has been on the wall for a while now. Thank you for your efforts!

Considering that the choice is really between no release and limited release, I'm all for a limited release. Security should be of utmost importance and that's why it's important to have updates fixing possible security issues. Those who can live with the limited features will update, so it's definitely better than nothing.

List of features important to me:

1. Clickable hyperlinks are by far the most important thing that led me (and many others) to PuTTY Tray in the first place and why I keep using it.
2. Tray icon and minimize to systray,
3. Always on top, sometimes handy.

[julianxhokaxhiu]

I am also fine with a limited release.

What I would like to see:

• tray functionality
• Start with Windows ( i love this very much combined with agent )
• copy openssh public keys
• embedded agent/keygen/etc.
• clickable URLs

Everything else for me is nice to have, but I don't care really much.

Cheers!

[ziesemer]

Agreed with others here. Absolutely, especially for this type of application, security and timely updates (especially anything released upstream) are of utmost importance (reference https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.70/htmldoc/AppendixD.html#udp-security). When PuTTYTray is not based on the current version of PuTTY, I can't use it as such.

Overall, mostly in agreement with @vovcacik and @tnuutine.

The features for why I most used PuTTYTray:

• Ctrl+mousewheel zoom support (https://superuser.com/questions/406839/is-there-way-to-change-font-size-in-putty-using-the-wheel-in-mouse-or-contrl)
• URL Hyperlinks
• Protocol Handlers (Support ssh:// URI #203)

Nice-to-haves:

• The various Pageant additions: Persist keys, Confirm key usage, Start with Windows (otherwise easy enough to manually throw in Startup folder), and additional Add / Copy options on "View Keys" dialog.
• Restart Session. Especially handy after sending an incorrect username at SSH login. Work-around is to duplicate session, then close the old window.

Never used:

• adb support.
• files support.
  • For those using this, what are the disadvantages to using https://portableapps.com/manuals/PortableApps.comLauncher/index.html or a similar alternative instead - removing this from being an application-specific concern?
• cygterm.
  • I use Putty with Cygwin ALL THE TIME. However, I don't see any need for PuTTY or other clones to go out of their way to support this. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/cygwin-terminal-window.html works perfectly for me. Using the 64-bit builds now available, the 2015-11-26 issue and work-around documented there is no longer even a thing. For anyone wanting more, I think any efforts would be better spent working with Cygwin to have the necessary support included in Cygwin's telnet server (as per the link here).

I wouldn't mind assisting with some actual development efforts here, as long as there is current documentation for creating successful builds. Fearing the abandonment of PuTTYTray, I had briefly started looking at creating my own fork of PuTTY with a few customizations (those I listed here). However, I was unable to get a proper project setup or build using Visual Studio 2017 (given https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30193063/c-error-rc2104-trying-to-compile-putty-pscp-for-windows-on-visual-studio-6-0 with both version.h and license.h, and a few other related errors).

Thank you for posting, and for giving PuTTYTray a new prospect at continued usage!

[czakey]

I'd love:

URL clicking
embedded agent, keygen
window transparency

I never used:

always on top
tray icon (sorry ;))
adb support
cygterm
start with Windows

BTW: many thanks for your work!

[thedewi]

Thanks for opening this conversation to us, FauxFaux. It does sound worth it to minimize the patch size. Here's my feature votes:

Used a lot by me -

• URL clicking
• Custom icon
• Settings in files
• Bell lights taskbar

Nice to have -

• OpenSSH key loading

[JasonUnger]

I also would support limited releases.

Used a lot by me:

• Embedded key gen / pageant
• File based configurations (I never use the registry, as my PuTTyTray lives in Dropbox)
• URL clicking
• Direct connection to the developer ;)