ViTransfer is moving to maintenance mode

[MansiVisuals]

Short version: ViTransfer keeps getting security updates every week, but i am not adding new features anymore.

Why

ViTransfer is feature-complete for what i set out to build. It does video review, timestamped feedback with annotations, approvals, photo albums, reverse share, and the rest, and it does them well enough that i use it in production myself. What is left is mostly upkeep, and upkeep is the part i can commit to long term.

I would rather be honest about that now than let the repo go quiet for months and leave you guessing whether it is still alive.

What still happens

Security patches, weekly, fully automated:

• Dependabot opens PRs every Monday for npm, GitHub Actions and the Docker base image, bundled so it stays a handful of PRs rather than dozens
• every PR runs the full test suite before it can merge: 19 clean-install tests and 22 upgrade tests against real Postgres and Redis containers
• patches and minors merge on their own once the tests pass, majors are skipped entirely
• before anything is published, the whole suite runs again against the exact tree being shipped
• if that passes, the release goes out automatically: amd64 and arm64 images pushed as both :<version> and :latest
• the release tests then run once more against the images that are actually on Docker Hub

The tests are the gate, not me. That is deliberate: a release that waits on me being at a keyboard is a release that does not happen when i am busy, and security patches sitting unreleased for three weeks is the failure mode i am trying to avoid. If any test fails, nothing is published and an issue is opened instead.

Quiet weeks are skipped. No release means there was nothing security related to ship, not that something broke.

What does not happen anymore

• new features
• non-security bug fixes, unless it is something that breaks a normal install
• feature requests
• major version bumps of dependencies, unless i decide one is worth it by hand

I will still read issues. Security reports get priority, and please send those privately through GitHub security advisories rather than a public issue.

What this means for you

If you are running ViTransfer, nothing changes. Keep pulling latest and you keep getting patched. The upgrade path is tested on every release, same as it has always been.

docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Version numbers keep counting up in patches (1.2.8, 1.2.9, and so on), because that is what these releases are.

If you would rather not track latest automatically, pin a version tag and update when you have read the release notes.

Pull requests

Still welcome. If you want a feature badly enough to build it, open a PR and i will review it. That is the realistic way new things land now.

The project is AGPL-3.0, so forking is fine too. If someone wants to take it further, go ahead.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who filed issues, tested releases and helped make this thing solid. If ViTransfer is useful to you, Ko-fi helps cover the time that keeps the patches coming.

[lamylio]

Thanks for the project. Appreciate it!