Do we need to fork this repo in order to take the work forward as a community?

[grant-allan-ctct]

I am creating this Issue to raise visibility to, and get community feedback on, a question raised recently (on #101 in this comment):

Should we consider taking a fork of this project?

There are a few different aspects to this:

• The project owner hasn't made a commit since 2023. I'm not sure whether anyone can confirm whether he is still interested, or even still with us? @juergenH87 @ffcps-juergen-heilgemeir - are you here?
• I don't whether anyone apart from the Owner has been granted Administrator rights for this repo? Does anyone else know? @snideto ?
• Someone with Administrator rights is needed in order to make best use of the ReadTheDocs integration work done towards Issue Add ReadTheDocs integration for automated documentation publishing #111 by @sharma66mahesh
• Without someone who has Administrator privileges, we also cannot create a Discussion board for this repo, in order to engage the community in a convenient way on various topics (as proposed in this comment).

I think that we have been gradually accumulating more and more topics that are worth discussing and strategizing as a community. But even if we find out what everyone prefers, maybe we still don't have mandate, or the necessary privileges, to act on the outcomes? Some examples of topics:

• We have started to consider the question of Release process on issue Release a new python package #101 from @fern-alex. I guess that tied into that is that we want to be careful about when and how to bump version numbers so that merges to master don't break things for the project's existing user base?
• Maybe we need to talk about a branching strategy that supports more multiple Release branches? Issue Python version compatibility  #91 from @j-c-cook mentioned how the latest code on master is using modern language features that make master's code no longer compatible with some versions of Python that are still supported by our python-can underpinnings. I think it would be useful to discuss how to be more deliberate about compatibility concerns like this one that our user-base may have, and get our CI/CD to help us stay true to what we decide.
• Aside from keeping faithful to different versions of the Python language, issue DeprecationWarning: The 'bustype' argument is deprecated since python-can v4.2.0 #116 from @VKlueber hints at us also needing some kind of strategy for keeping in step with python-can updates. Issue MessageListener No Longer Works With Latest Python-Can Listener #78 from @drewr95 is about an incompatibility with python-can that already bit us.

So bottom line - new fork of this repo? (hopefully one with a Discussion board?) What does everyone think? Is there any viable alternative?

@khauersp @linzbdav @BeatsByGilb @GraysonNocera @paulbrandkvernelandmechatronics @kellergoech @Katsie011 @hezy0426 @ovenystas @pmoosman @uncoldice @tinova-1 @Kraxxis @sheckey @TurirBarym @sbaconbits @BegiraTool @pvkarthikk @gardenvariety42 @cargabright

[drewr95]

@snideto has admin access, @khauersp and I both are coworkers with him.

[VKlueber]

Is there any viable alternative?

I would say let´s wait for a few days if this issue helps to identify admins which can help to extend the group of admins with some people willing to actively contribute. If not I can not think of a viable alternative.

[drewr95]

@grant-allan-ctct I just got back from paternity leave and forgot about this.

I'll make sure to get @snideto to look at this today.

[snideto]

Yeah, I haven't heard anything from @juergenH87 in quite a while. My team is actively using this repo and will be for the foreseeable future, so we'll definitely be maintaining this work in some form whether it is here or on a fork. I haven't done a great job keeping up with new issues here, but I'm hopefully at a point where I can spend some time getting caught up on some of this work. I haven't tried granting anyone else admin yet, but assuming that I can, I'd be willing to do so if there's interest.

[VKlueber]

@snideto could we get the permissions for:
https://github.com/RaulSMS and myselve (@VKlueber)?
We both work for Proemion

[snideto]

Doesn't look like I have access to give others admin rights:

[grant-allan-ctct]

Doesn't look like I have access to give others admin rights:

I see the same, @snideto - I think that you and I have been assigned "collaborator" roles, which allows us to limp along here to an extent, if either of us is available - BUT we cannot do some things that I feel are vital to the longevity of this project and its community, such as start a Discussion board or expand project leadership to bring in more people.

[kellergoech]

At the moment I aldeady have to use my Fork because it has the send buffer which I need for our usecase. So I would be happy to hear that there will be more activity in main branch so I can use it again.

[VKlueber]

The project owner just contacted me via mail 🚀 .

I asked him to grant permissions to the people raised their interest here in this ticket.

[sheckey]

Hello everyone. I haven’t been around to add to the conversation. Hello! I had earlier asked about integrating some changes that I made to support extended transport protocol (ETP). I suppose that is what got me onto this list, which is great. I’m sort of a Python rookie so it would need a review. Once I hear that the permissions business is all sorted out, then I can try to clean up my changeset and make a pull request, right!? I’ve also never contributed any open source and I just started using git. You’re probably wondering what this guy does do - hah. Anyway it’s great to hear that you are moving forward and I would love to make a pull request and have it reviewed to make it acceptable. I have been using the library quite a bit. Very exciting and thank you.

[ilanbiala]

@VKlueber any response from the project owner?

[VKlueber]

Unfortunately I was wrong. I used the e-mail address I found in the license info of this repository. But unfortunately it turned out this was not the contact of the owner of this repo but from the owner this repo was forked from. So still no response from the owner of this repo. So whenever we have time we would for this repo within the next weeks and would post the link here. If someone else wants to go first -feel free of course.

[VKlueber]

Finally we forked the repo: https://github.com/RaulSMS/python-can-j1939

My colleague @RaulSMS will add people who showed their interest to contribute on the new forked repo. We hope this will kick of a new success story for the package!

[grant-allan-ctct]

Sorry for my ignorance, but what is the mechanism to have the new fork up-and-running with tooling such as pip? The readme on the new fork mentions to use pip install can-j1939 but won't that continue to install the goodies from this current repo?

[VKlueber]

@grant-allan-ctct we have not touched this for now but I assume we will have to publish a new package with a new name on PyPi. We need to tackle all these things step by step and definetly need as many helping hands as possible ;-