Sunday, April 9, 2017

Adwaita

This weekend I have been playing with an open source project, the Processing language, which seems to be a great tool for computer graphics design/development, it provides and high level language, abstracting you from the more  l ow-level technical aspects of graphics programming.

I have been looking  on how to use it with Python as the development language, I have found two options:

  1. Python Mode for Processing which is a language supporte addon for Processing's IDE, it work as a wrapper for the processing java lib, it's based on jython,
  2. pyprocessing pypi package which is a regular python package, implementing the processing language using OpenGL and Pyglet for the renering


I preferred to go with the pypi package in order to be able to keep developing in a python ecosystem without java dependencies. Unfortunately I have found the pyprocessing development has been abandoned. I have found a github repository with the last commit from 5 years ago, and which actually fails to install/run because of a missing one line import statement.

So here I was again, forking yet another repository, because I found a project which I believe to have a great potential but for whatever reason is no longer maintained. Since this is becoming a common case, creating "keep it working" repositories, I gave it some more thought.

There are many abandoned, yet useful/interesting open source projects. It most commonly happens when projects are started/developed by a single person, sometimes just as prototypes, and at a given point in time the author loses the interest/capacity to maintain it. There is a lot of people with great technical skills/interest in software development, but very limited in community/team building. I have been there.

This is the reason why I have decided to start a new project, with the name "Adwaita" whose goal is to maintain open source projects vitality. The primary focus will be on keeping "poorly maintained" open source projects in better conditions to be adopted/driven by project specific communities.

In an "inception" kick-off style, Adwaita will be the first project managed by the Adwaita task force.

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