Question: Is Revolution IRC still being actively developed?

[marek22k]

Hello,

I saw that the last commit was from 2021 - meanwhile is 2023, so I wanted to ask if Revolution IRC is still actively developed and when the next update will come? If it is no longer being developed, does anyone know of a FLOSS alternative?

[kurahaupo]

@marek22k I haven't seen the original developer (@MCMrARM ) around for a while, but it's an open source project so it's entirely possible to create your own fork, and doing so on github is quite easy. (Getting the build process working is a bit more involved, and getting it published on GooglePlay takes some work.)

If you want to do that, there are already a number of pull requests open, including two by me, especially #332 to improve support for mIRC colours and add support for ANSI colours & attributes.

[MCMrARM]

I stopped using Android as my primary device and instead moved to a web client to connect to IRC. I lost motivation to continue the project as a result. I also stopped using IRC for a large part as most of the communities I talk with moved as well and my IRC setup broke as I was busy with other things.

In addition, most of the codebase can already be considered legacy. I also personally don't fully like the idea of chatlib and think it was probably best if the client was implemented in a more traditional way. In addition, the code makes heavy use of threaded code, which is completely unnecessary and only causes stability issues. newui was an attempt to make the UI code and appearance more modern (there also was some work on purging the multi-threaded code), but was since made obsolete by official view binding, which is preferable to my own custom adapter framework probably, and unnecessarily introduced dependency injection in my opinion.

I again apologize for my disappearance from the project. If someone wants to take over development of the client that's fine with me. I can probably dedicate some time to do PR merging/review, but my time management skill is negative and as such I found it hard to actually review PRs and do releases.

In addition, for any new Google Play releases the app would need to updated to the newest Android SDK revision, whatever is needed for that. If someone manages to complete the PR and test that it works (please in particular test DCC downloads/uploads as that is what I'm most concerned about), I will do a release.

[MCMrARM]

I meant the app would have to target a recent version of Android. And actually, updating the API target might also break theming due to the reflection API restrictions, who knows.

A large part of why I got demotivated and switched to iOS is that as well (first the Android 8 notification API which made the in-app notification settings more hacky and required wasting time to even figure out how to still allow the user to customize some additional settings you can't edit in Android settings; then the gesture navigation changes made all drawers work badly, restricted apps abilities to provide custom gestures on the edges completely, all while working like garbage compared to iOS was the final thing that made me drop this platform).

[kurahaupo]

@MCMrARM I'm happy to take over maintenance & development if you're no longer interested. However I've not dealt with setting up Jenkins and a Play Store account so I'd prefer to continue the current repo rather than fork it, if you're happy to grant me access.

I'm committed to Android as a "nearly open source" platform, and I don't expect to change any time soon.