Formulate plan given AlecAivazis/survey going unmaintained

[andyfeller]

Overview

The GitHub CLI has depended upon https://github.com/AlecAivazis/survey for defining our prompting experience, however we will need to begin looking to the future as the primary maintainer is unable to continue supporting this effort. The repository was marked read-only on September 23rd 2023 and becomes an unmaintained dependency.

Firstly, a big warm thank you to @AlecAivazis for devoting so much time and energy to a project that has benefited others! ❤ 🤗 We would like to wish you only the best.

Secondly, this issue is to understand the other options available for managing the GitHub CLI prompting experience. The AlecAivazis/survey project suggests consideration of https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea, however it is unclear how well the project fits and how much effort is involved in switching. As a team of 3 engineers currently, it is unrealistic that we would be able to adopt and support the project ourselves.

[AlecAivazis]

Thanks for the ping here! If there is someone on the cli team that wants to take ownership, I would more than gladly hand over the repository - just let me know who/what org!

[maaslalani]

Hi! I’m from the Charm team and one of the Bubble Tea maintainers. Would you be interested in some assistance with this? We believe we can produce and maintain something sustainable that will suit your needs here.

[williammartin]

Hi @AlecAivazis, thanks for the offer. Right now we don't think that we'd be best positioned to take ownership of the project as we don't have the capacity to support it properly, and wouldn't want to give that impression to the community. If that changes, we'll definitely reach out to you.

@maaslalani, we would be interested in chatting with you about this. I think some members of the team past and present have evaluated BubbleTea for our uses before with limited success but we think that since we have your ear as a maintainer, and you've generously offered some time, that it's definitely worth having a discussion. How would be best to proceed on your end?

[maaslalani]

Awesome @williammartin! How about if we hop on a call to chat through it quickly? My email is maas@charm.sh.

[tetienne]

Any news about this? https://github.com/charmbracelet/huh has been released since.

[williammartin]

No news @tetienne, we worked together with the Charm folks testing huh out with gh and providing feedback but actually doing a move over is a large chunk of work. It's definitely something we're still interested in. Is there a reason that you're interested in this beyond curiosity?

[tetienne]

@williammartin Sorry for the delay. Well, I’m often looking at this project to get idea on my own projects. So, I’m really curious what would be your survey lib replacement. And huh looks like pretty nice, but with obviously small caveat due to this young age :)

[williammartin]

Hey @tetienne, we're still interested in huh. When working with the folks from charm we integrated it with gh in order to give feedback and we liked it. It's just a big piece of work to swap it out, both from an engineering perspective but also for the change that our users will see, and so we haven't prioritised it yet. We are in the process of going through an accessibility audit for gh, which may help motivate moving.

huh is young as you say, but the folks from charm have a lot of experience delivering terminal packages, and they have funding to continue maintaining it.