Closing all issues and pull requests for inuitcss 5.x

[csswizardry]

Hi all,

Firstly, please allow me to apologise profusely for my lack of activity on this project over the last few months. I’ve been incredibly busy, and open-source has had to take something of a back seat. I appreciate your enthusiasm and contributions, and I am sorry for not doing them justice.

I am going to, at some point soon, I hope, rewrite inuitcss completely. The project is reasonably stable, but there are some fundamental design decisions at its core which are hampering it. I hope to rebuild inuitcss in a much more flexible and extensible manner, which will also allow me to address and merge in issues and changes a lot more easily: the rewrite will help the framework itself, and the community around it.

Again, I thank you all for your contributions, and apologise for letting you down. I sincerely hope that the new version of inuitcss will suit you better, and that you continue to offer suggestions and improvements.

I am going to close all currently open issues and pull requests, and apply them to the rewrite as-and-where I see fit.

I’m hoping to run a Kickstarter campaign to fund taking a month or so off of work to rebuild, rewrite, and document the framework (docs, finally!!!), as well as recording some tutorial-style screencasts etc. This can only happen if the Kickstarter is successful—given the time it would take, I couldn’t justify going that long unpaid—so, if you’ve used or benefitted from inuitcss, please consider supporting its Kickstarter campaign once it’s live.

To keep up to date, follow the official inuitcss Twitter account.

Many thanks, and apologies once more,
Harry

[jpkempf]

No need to apologize! As it stands, inuit.css has already been a great help to me and I appreciate all the time you've put into it. I'll definitely swing by your Kickstarter once it's available and add my share to the pile. :-)

What kind of rewrite are we talking about here - are you going to start from scratch again, no looking back? Or can we expect some extent of backwards-compatability with existing sites built on inuit?

[kikito]

While I don't think I would have done the same as you, I can understand that real life gets in the way. I wish you luck getting money to work on this.

In the meantime, here are some questions about your plan:

• What is the backup plan? If the kick-starter fails, what will happen to inuit.css? Will you continue to work on it (just much more slowly) or will you just abandon it?
• Do you plan to do a kick-starter for every new major version of the app?
• Even if the kickstarter is a success, what will happen when the money runs out? Will you stop answering to issues again?

Please don't misunderstand me: I am not asking with malice or spite. I believe that people interested the long-term viability of the project will want to know these answers, too. Again, best of luck.

[csswizardry]

@kikito Hey! Thanks for the questions, and they’re totally reasonable:

• What is the backup plan? I want to rebuild inuitcss whether the project gets backed or not. The Kickstarter is mainly to fund the time needed for docs (the reason docs don’t currently exist is because it just takes so long, and I can’t give up that much time for free). If the Kickstarter fails, I’ll rebuild inuitcss and probably not do any docs/screencasts at all. I work for myself, so time == money, and I can’t justify giving so much time in return for nothing.
• Do you plan to Kickstart every new major version? No, I don’t, not at all. There are a lot of things wrong with the current version of inuitcss (which I shall expand on when we get to the Kickstarter phase) which only need solving once. An initial chunk of work will get rid of, and document, these problems, then from there it should be plain sailing.
• What will happen when the money runs out? I’m only looking for enough to cover a month or so of my time—and to hire a designer—to get things in place, so the money will run out. From then, it will become a regular OSS project. One of the main aims of the new version is to improve the way I can work on it, as well as improving the framework itself, so the next version should never be able to stagnate as much as previous ones have.

tl;dr The Kickstarter is intended to cover a chunk of finite time up front in order to make the rewrite (and documentation) happen. The rewrite will improve the framework and how easy it is to maintain, which will hopefully prevent the project from stagnating this much ever again.

I hope that helps,
H

[jahvi]

That sounds reasonable, count me in to back it up inuit has helped me so much I have no problem giving back.

[mattwatsoncodes]

I can't wait for the kickstarter to begin! Let us know when you have the link :-)

[nicolashery]

Thanks @csswizardry, best of luck!

[vinayraghu]

👍 the community is here to help

[sukei]

Best of luck!

[nicoespeon]

👍 best of luck, looking for the campaign and see how we can help =)

[andykirk]

Excited to hear about the new inuit - I'm intrigued to see what changes you have in mind. My only request/wish is that any opinionated settings (e.g. colours) are set as variables :-)
Happy to support the kick starter, let us know when it's up.

Cheers

[Caparico]

Cheers for this much needed project.
This is the only un-opinionated CSS (SASS) framework I know.
I would gladly contribute to your KickStarter project, once it's launched.

Best

[felippenardi]

Can't wait to help you fund it.

Don't overthink, give your price and the community is here to support.

[montchr]

Just checking in again. Looking forward to what's next for inuitcss. And I'll certainly contribute what $$$ I can. :)

[jbeja]

Best luck.

[kursusHC]

Thank you REALLY MUCH for doing this. Inuit.css is by far the best css grid out there, watching it slowly dying was a real pain for me. Is the kickstarter set up yet ?

[felippenardi]

Not yet... we have to pray for nice people stop paying him, so he can have some time :P

[mtwalsh]

Glad to hear a new version is on the cards and looking forward to the Kickstarter project.

[csswizardry]

Thanks for the support, everyone! If you would like a sneak preview of the new inuitcss, I’ve changed it into an organisation and started uploading proof-of-concepts: https://github.com/inuitcss

[scottsilvi]

+1 for getting kickstarter started. Big fan of the skinless approach

[HellPat]

+1 kickstarter campain. Idea still alive?

[borkie]

I love inuit! +1 for anything that might help

[felippenardi]

It seems something is coming on kickstart! Follow @csswizardry on twitter, we may hear something soon.

[laurentperroteau]

When Inuit is near, I test it and comment it.
I'd love to use it for my next project, best luck.

[sonnyking]

So is it just me or does inuitcss seem dead?

[florianbouvot]

@sonnyking inuitcss isn't dead, this repo is an older version, had a look here : https://github.com/inuitcss

[renatocarvalho]

I think @kikito points are excellent.

First, I'm very thankful for all the really hard work that you @csswizardry has put on open source projects, blog posts and presentations sharing your knowledge.

But the one thing that concerns me more, is that everything is tied mainly to @csswizardry, the community is not empowered enough to keep evolving the project. So it won't evolve or move forward without him. I know @csswizardry is the creator of the project, but I believe we could have more great people helping on this so it won't stop to evolve if someone gets busy. So I think this is the biggest challenge for Inuitcss. I might be wrong, but this is my vision today about Inuit.

[vinayraghu]

What @renatocarvalho brings up is a common issue in all open source projects. Since it's open source, anyone can make a fork and begin maintaining it. But it'll still be a fork and not the original project. So any upstream changes could potentially affect the fork, especially in case of a ground-up rewrite. Unless @csswizardry himself chooses to delegate to some people he trusts, I don't think we can demand that of him to keep his project moving even when he doesn't have the time.

[deserted]

@rvinay88 very true, however I think this is part of what @csswizardry is trying to solve with the rewrite - one of the results of breaking inuit into a completely modular setup means that if someone has a feature they'd like to develop for it, they can now write it in their own repository, and it can be used by anyone far more simply - with the modular setup having modules under different namespaces, with different maintainers is going to be far simpler, especially when bower is being pushed as the deployment method. IE if I wanted to use inuit with a float based grid instead of the inline grid, I could develop a repo at deserted/inuit-objects-layout-float and just use bower to pull that in instead of the inuitcss/objects.layout module