Status of the project

[Svenskunganka]

I'm opening this issue to serve as a place for discussion about the project because I feel like development of the project and its ecosystem has stagnated. There hasn't been a new release in almost a year, there are many confirmed bugs in the issue tracker and most of the PRs are either waiting to be reviewed or are ready to be merged.
Development of parts of the Stylus ecosystem has more or less stopped too. Many useful plugins and editor integrations has either been put on hold or completely abandoned.

How does it look like for you @Panya, @kizu & @corysimmons? I'm sure you all are busy, but it would be great if we could work out a plan for continued development of Stylus.
I'm sure there are some community members that would be willing to help out reviewing PRs, sorting out issues and fixing bugs, me included. How does that sound?

Thanks for taking time reading!

[corysimmons]

Most of the commits on the core project are from @Panya and @kizu -- I just did the website. I'm happy to update the website when I get some time.

[kaisermann]

Willing to help if needed :)

[corysimmons]

@kaisermann You prefer JS or web-design tasks?

The docs should also adhere to a specific convention rather than a confusing grab-bag of possible syntaxes, if you're just up for doing grunt work to make the project stronger.

[Svenskunganka]

I'm down to do either, but I think the best course of action for the time being is adding more members to the org with commit access to the repositories if the current core members are having trouble finding time to set away. That way, we can start reviewing & merging PRs and grunt out some of the long-standing bugs. However I'm waiting for a comment from @Panya and @kizu and hear out what their opinions and current status looks like.

[hinaria]

i'd also love to contribute and see us fix all the bugs and pain points that have accumulated over the years.

i love stylus, and have used it extensively, but i have first hand experience of several situations where teams have chosen sass after evaluating stylus because big long standing usability issues have not been fixed.

[corysimmons]

@Svenskunganka I think you, or anyone, would need to contribute some to the project to get in the org.

Just start picking off issues then ask.

This is the way my fathers and their fathers before them have always done it.

[Svenskunganka]

@corysimmons Yes of course, that was my plan all along until I noticed the current list of PRs and identified bugs were at a standstill so it seemed pointless to just add to the pile, so to speak.

The reason I opened this issue was to serve as a place to discuss the project and what can be done to kickstart development. I apologize if my previous comment sounded like a takeover, I realize now my bad choice of wording with "That way, we can start [...]" might've suggested that, but I personally am not interested in being a member of the org unless absolutely necessary (i.e nobody else can/wants and the current members don't see any change in the foreseeable future), as I cannot myself guarantee I will have the time to set away to manage this project.
However, I definitely want to and intend to contribute to the project, but the reason I haven't done so thus far is because I'm worried it'll just pile up and go to waste (since there's no one reviewing or merging).

But I agree with you, and will start familiarize myself with the codebase 😄

[corysimmons]

@Svenskunganka I feel ya. I hate it when PRs sit dormant.

I don't work on the main project (just the website), but it looks like there are only 16 outstanding PRs with half of them only being a month or 2 old.

Compared to other projects of this size, that ain't too bad.

Your concerns are valid though. I'd love to see this project revitalized. @Panya has been single-handedly working on it for a long time.

That said, I still think the only way Panya (or Kizu, or anyone) is going to trust anyone to merge code is by demonstrating you have the ability to write good code.

1. Write good, non-breaking, correctly versioned, PRs.
2. Work with @Panya and @kizu to make sure they're concerns are addressed about specific PRs.
3. Get a couple merged.
4. Ask to be a contributor.

I know you're on the fence about becoming a contrib, but there were some other people in this thread who mentioned they would be interested. That's the path forward for them... in any project.

For my part, if development picks back up, I'm happy to redesign something better and clean up docs. I'd want to wait until the API was stable before working on docs tbh.

[hinaria]

i don't think anyone here expects to be randomly given contributor status, especially so without having first made significant contributions to stylus. we're not asking for it, and it's not our goal.

at least for me, i am only hoping that we see a commitment to review issues and pull requests that are filed against stylus, perhaps once a month or so, whether it be from old core members or in a new appointment of reviewers who the core members trust.

---

@Svenskunganka expressed my concerns very well: as an outsider, it looked like stylus was bordering on becoming abandonware for a long time. there appeared to be very little activity from core members. and without that, stylus could not move forward. let me explain why:

when i was about to submit a pull request last december, i'd wager that at least half of all issues and pull requests had no comment from any team member at all - even ones that had sat idle for 6 months. some of my biggest issues and pain points with stylus have been sitting there, seemingly dead, without comment, merge, or rejection, for more than a full year. looking today, i now see that the pr: needs review tag has been added to many of the pull requests, which is a great start, though it seems that no actual review has yet taken place.

there'd been no action to acknowledge that yes, some issue was a bug, or to merge (or reject) a given pull request, or anything of that sort. the commit log did not give any more inspiration, either. the project looked like it'd sat dead for a good year, and any changes one might submit would go unheard.

i think that's been the factor driving people towards alternatives, and from trying to fix issues - your efforts seemed to go down an empty vortex, and that is at least mildly demotivating.

so in summary, at least several of us are just hoping that if we spend time writing an improvement or bug fix, someone will say "this is bad, i won't merge it", or "thank you" and then actually hit the merge button. similarly for issues.

i love stylus, and i desperately hope to see a future where stylus is still commonplace ♡

[corysimmons]

I didn't look at the PRs. I didn't realize things had sat dormant for so long. Panya always seemed fast to me.

I think @Panya @kizu are the only ones that can add someone else. It's entirely up to them.

i love stylus, and i desperately hope to see a future where stylus is still commonplace ♡

Me too.

[corysimmons]

Could also do something like io.js did when the Node team was dragging. Fork and merge anything you want. If the fork is passing tests, looks good, and is picking up steam, then the 2 projects could be merged in the future.

[chrisdothtml]

Just noticed this issue and love Stylus. Would be happy to contribute where needed

[maranomynet]

Stylus has gone through two spurts of activity to date: https://github.com/stylus/stylus/graphs/contributors?from=2011-05-16&to=2017-04-19&type=c

The first one during the first 18 months or so when @tj was pretty much doing everything. Then when he abandoned the project mid-year 2012 there was about a year of nothing happening, until @Panya and @kizu took over early summer 2013 and started the second spurt which lasted until early 2016.

Question is, are there people willing to step up and assume the role of lead developers, and will the current maintainers let them?

I dearly love Stylus as the best-of-breed CSS preprocessor, and really hope it remains alive and healthy for a long time!

[maranomynet]

I feel like leaving a I❤️Stylus appreciation comment to cheer this thread up a bit...

Things I love about Stylus:

• Super strong focus on usability for the CSS developers.
• Friendly developers, willing to discuss and embrace new ideas.
• Ability to read data from JSON files json().
• Uncluttered, readable syntax with minimal verbosity.
• Dead easy extensibility via use() and JavaScript modules.
• Transparent mixins.

Minor peeves:

• - is allowed as first character of variable/mixin/function names.
• Using calc() is cumbersome.

[chrisdothtml]

@maranomynet My favorite thing about it has always been how close the syntax is to Javascript. LESS feels like CSS with a few tools draped over it with less-than-desirable syntax. Stylus has always felt like an actual full CSS programming language. It's why I still prefer it over things like PostCSS