The thing with old, critical software is that after some time people don’t really want to dig through decades of C code and prefer to write something new using modern tools. Those projects get plenty of support because people actually do want to work on them. If no one wants to work on rsync than what the maintainer is doing now is just prolong it’s agony a couple of years. I would say he should do the minimum work, announce end of life date and move on. People that need tools like rsync will develop something.
Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.
Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.
Here are the percent of commits from the top committer in each repository you mentioned, as well as rsync, over the last 3 months:
rsync: 99.0%
restic: 93.2%
rclone: 87.5%
union: 82.9%
syncthing: 74.4%
As you can see, each of this projects depends heavily on a single person, though to a lesser degree than rsync. That’s just the nature of most open-source software.
Note that I excluded dependabot commits from the calculations and counted Claude commits as the lead developer for rsync
People that rely on rsync start looking for alternatives
They try to switch and figure out what functionality is missing
They contribute to some of the alternative to fill the gaps
For example, I’m about to setup some syncing for my homelab and I will not use rsync for that. That’s why talking about the state of rsync is important. As I said, it’s not about attacking the dev for not working hard enough. It’s about long term planning.
I remember when the maintainer for discord.py stepped down. He eventually stepped back in because no one wanted took over the project and he didn’t want to see it die. This was before the current AI era, all someone had to do was continue to develop it.
I think almost everyone will do step 2 and 3 but not step 4.
The fact that open source exist and functions so well for decades shows that people do step 4. If no one wants to step in it usually means the project is not important.
https://github.com/rclone/rclone
https://github.com/restic/restic
https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison
https://syncthing.net/
The thing with old, critical software is that after some time people don’t really want to dig through decades of C code and prefer to write something new using modern tools. Those projects get plenty of support because people actually do want to work on them. If no one wants to work on rsync than what the maintainer is doing now is just prolong it’s agony a couple of years. I would say he should do the minimum work, announce end of life date and move on. People that need tools like rsync will develop something.
Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.
Here are the percent of commits from the top committer in each repository you mentioned, as well as rsync, over the last 3 months:
As you can see, each of this projects depends heavily on a single person, though to a lesser degree than rsync. That’s just the nature of most open-source software.
Note that I excluded dependabot commits from the calculations and counted Claude commits as the lead developer for rsync
How I imagine this:
For example, I’m about to setup some syncing for my homelab and I will not use rsync for that. That’s why talking about the state of rsync is important. As I said, it’s not about attacking the dev for not working hard enough. It’s about long term planning.
I remember when the maintainer for discord.py stepped down. He eventually stepped back in because no one wanted took over the project and he didn’t want to see it die. This was before the current AI era, all someone had to do was continue to develop it.
I think almost everyone will do step 2 and 3 but not step 4.
The fact that open source exist and functions so well for decades shows that people do step 4. If no one wants to step in it usually means the project is not important.
The trouble with some of those projects (e.g. unison and sun thing) is that they don’t solve the same problem, not really.
A rewrite with modern tooling would be better done if it was incremental.