Team awareness required: Future project state

[knalli]

Hi everybody,

welcome to 2024, hope you find a good start in the new year.

I want to get your attention about this project once more. @angular-translate/owners @angular-translate/members @angular-translate/core

First of all want to say thank you for all your work and contributions in the past. Since the project creation from Pascal, it was a community driven project always. In fact, that was the way I got hooked.

But, this project has been moving in a somehow transcendence mode for some years. Specifically, since AngularJS final extended supported exceeded on January 2022, the overall issue rate here has dropped. Also most likely, some users may have seen already the "degraded pace" in commits, release and also issues.

We have major ideas/issues we won't do ever, sometimes because of underlaying AngularJS security/design decisions. We can't change them without breaking everything and building a bigger rewrite. Also, I don't see we adding more features anymore. And finally, if something will break with future clients/systems (browsers), we would have to deal with deprecated and unsupported ecosystem. Apart from that, our build setup is also getting on in years. Even this stuff is sometimes unsupported, if I get it right.

I have been putting off writing this message for some time: We have to put this project down finally. My idea was putting the repository in the lock down (GitHub's archive/readonly). Everything stay here and everybody can grab the source code, even forking it.

Some days ago, I was contacted by @joeeames, how brought up the idea either supporting us or taking care of it for providing further support for the users (probably mostly enterprises) with a further long term support. He also recommends we should create a final release for getting the users attention at most.. yes, that is right and was also my plan.

Instead of a further slow death, here are the steps I would recommend:

1. Prepend the README.md with a "flashing" text informing about the project end. => This creates a final decision.
2. Create a final patch release 2.19.1 with the same information text and link to the README.md. This will update npmjs.org also. => This makes users aware, at least the one who read changelogs. The other ones will not care anyway.
3. Enable the GitHub archive mode (means readonly). => Marks project state. All documentation, issues, demos, links to stack overflow will stay.
4. Enable npmjs deprecation messages. => Marks project state.

In theory, we could give someone (like Joe) access to this repository managing everything, but I cannot trust someone I don't know and give the control about a project (GitHub + npmjs). This is not personally and I believe his motivation, but such take overs / security issues have been done too often in the past with in-use libraries.
But I'm fine linking to a maintained fork from our readme, even from the release notes if things are clean at this point.

So, here we are. Please engage, please say what you think.

[tspaeth]

Hey, @knalli - to make my comment short: Good idea and I support your approach / concept.

[joeeames]

One thing I'd like to add to this, is that the README.md include a link to the ongoing support that HeroDevs would offer.

As mentioned although we're happy to get access to the repositories, it's fine if that isn't done. HeroDevs is now the official provider of long term support for AngularJS (among several other projects such as Drupal) so we do have a long history and the trust of the Angular team.

[knalli]

One thing I'd like to add to this, is that the README.md include a link to the ongoing support that HeroDevs would offer.

Sure, as already said that I'm fine with this. I'll propose the texts the next days and you can give more details than.

[0x-r4bbit]

Hey everyone,

Pascal here (yes it's me, I can sign a message for proof - or go check the contributions/commits).

First of all, I want to say thank you @knalli for all the work you've done here and keeping the ball rolling. I've removed myself from this project a long time ago and I think angular-translate is a perfect example that shows that open source can work and sustain itself with a healthy community.

Now, what you're bringing up is something i agree with.
I haven't been doing anything Angular related in a long time, so I don't have a good picture of what's the usage of AngularJS in this space. However I'm not surprised when people tell me that enterprise companies are still using it and can't simply upgrade to something else.

angular-translate has always been open source, we've never charged for anything so we're also not owning anyone anything. With that said, I think it's perfectly fine to settle the project, at least from the core team's perspective in the sense that we'll no longer maintain it.

I think archiving the repositories and putting them in read-only is the way to go.
The problem with trust assumptions you're bringing up is a very valid concern.

If teams like HeroDevs and/or @joeeames want to take over the work or maintain it, I think it's best if it's done via a fork. Anyone is free to do so and I wouldn't be surprised if people have done it anyways.

Green light from me doing the steps you've described.
Also, if you have the time and energy, feel free to work anything out with Joe. I know him personally and the people behind HeroDevs as well.

Thanks again for all the work and patience with this project!

[knalli]

Thank you all for your input.

@0x-r4bbit Yeah, I have already stumbled across this some days ago. Got the proof by your history. ;)

@joeeames I have prepared the readme text in a branch. I have add a link to you site, but please feel to update me when things can be more detailed. https://github.com/angular-translate/angular-translate/blob/6fb2f1a4dad714f0666ad9f520a97c29ccb61a57/README.md

[knalli]

Well, while I'm writing these lines, the background processes of some servers currently deploying all the notices.

• new releases built and tagged in the git repositories
• pushed into the bower (😱) repositories as well as to the npm registry
• nearly all git repositories are now archived being now read-only
• all library projects on the npm registry are flagged as deprecated
• the docs index file also contain a prominent notice

The (un)funny part of this was however, these tasks were not so easily to accomplish. It's a very old environment technically incompatible with a modern arm64/Mac M1/2 hardware...

I'll close this repository next week also.

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❤️ So again, thank you all: all project members, but also all contributors of this project. But also big thanks to all the users.

[knalli]

So long, and thanks for all the fish.