Hermes needs an active maintainer

[winny-]

Hi!

It has come to my attention that I don't have the time and ambition to maintain Hermes, so I'm looking for a dedicated maintainer to actively work on Hermes. In addition I won't have a Mac to maintain Hermes with, starting in a few weeks. I do intend to contribute back where it's sensibile -- e.g. I might end up with an old mac mini for some work projects, so maybe this won't be the last of my contributions. Regardless, we should find somebody that better fits the project responsibilities.

One person that comes to mind is @Aahung.

Any thoughts, comments, feedback is welcome.

[bradmkjr]

Thank you for all that you have done, and the rest of the Hermes team. It has been a great project and really do not want to see it become abandonware. I don't have the technical ability to be any help, and my needs probably differ too far from the majority of users (I'm still on 10.8.5).

[aahung]

Hermes is a great projects due to many contributors. I would like to continue to contribute more. I don't have adequate skills and experience (I am gaining), hope to form a maintain group.

[nriley]

I should mention that this goes for me too — unlike @winny- I do still use a Mac every day but am busier than I've ever been at work and have multiple open source projects of my own that I'm trying to keep maintained as well. I've really enjoyed working on Hermes and really enjoyed seeing it flourish, but unfortunately can't be part of its development in the forseeable future.

[obycode]

I'd like to help keep this project alive. I have only recently discovered Hermes and I love it. I've already made some changes to make it build with Xcode 7, to send the distributed notifications immediately, and to add a distributed notification for player state changes. I'd be happy to contribute here and there.

[DrPat]

awesome... I use Hermes... but unfortunately I am not a coder.

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 6:22 AM, obycode notifications@github.com wrote:

I'd like to help keep this project alive. I have only recently discovered Hermes and I love it. I've already made some changes to make it build with Xcode 7, to send the distributed notifications immediately, and to add a distributed notification for player state changes. I'd be happy to contribute here and there.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/HermesApp/Hermes/issues/237#issuecomment-148384250.

Thank you for your attention,

Maurice P. O'Connor

[nriley]

@obycode Great! Please feel free to fork away :-)

[obycode]

@nriley I have forked and submitted a pull request, but CI didn't seem to like it and I'm not sure why. I'll need to spend some time figuring out what is wrong there.

[nriley]

Ugh, sorry :-/ Good luck.

[dwaite]

I'd also be interested in keeping the app alive

[nriley]

Great. Perhaps a couple of you could start a fork, start contributing to it and if it makes some decent progress it can replace the "official" version here?

[nriley]

It might help to merge some of the outstanding pull requests... the networking one @dwaite filed looks like a good candidate!

[sheykh-sleky]

I can compile, test, and grep logs all day long. But that isn't anything to write home. Happy to test, and assist where I can. Alas my coding skills are, er, coding skills? hehe... Still. The integration with the keyboard (play, pause, next) is hands down, why this cannot die!

[amites]

@Aahung are you still interested in working on this?

If no-one else wants to stand up for this one, I'm willing to keep active on top of pull requests and some fixes (no guarantees to pleasing everyone but I'd like to see this stay alive)

[sm11963]

I am interested in contributing to this project. I am experienced with iOS dev but haven't worked with Mac apps before. I've been using Hermes for 2 years now and just realized its maintenance has been dropped :(.

I don't have the time right now to jump in head first but come June I should have some extra time to dedicate. I would really hate to see this application go under.

[nriley]

Thanks folks! I would recommend one or more of you fork Hermes and start merging patches. If there becomes a consensus I can give you access to the project and at some point we will figure out the way to share the appropriate information for making an actual release!

[jmjones88]

I'd be interested in taking on ownership on Hermes. I've already forked it and have it building on OS 10.11(Ah the deprecations!), and seems to be running, after much work on compiler issues.

I still have some issues, like getting an error code 9 on initial login, but hopefully I'll have it fixed up soon. I'll make a pull request once it's running correctly.

[jmjones88]

Travis CI has passed all the building checks, so it should be good to go for Xcode 7.3 - Pull Request #262 . I'll keep working to merge all the existing patches in to it as well

[nriley]

Awesome! Will take a look later this week — one warning for the future (from personal experience :-) is to make sure with the deprecation fixes that you're clear about your eventual OS minimum requirement.

[jmjones88]

Great. Thanks for the tip! The biggest change was using NSRunningApplication (available in OS 10.6 and later) instead of ProcessSerialNumber (Which was deprecated in 10.9 i believe) to deal with hotkey support. Everything else was mainly syntax changes

[obycode]

@jmjones88 - I just created a pull request to your repo with the two changes that I'd like to see that help Hermes work better with third parties using the notifications. I'd be happy to help with maintenance work too.

[jmjones88]

@obycode Thanks for that, I merged your requests in. Also thank you for all the work you did updating it for Xcode 7, it sure was a great resource

[obycode]

Great, I'm glad it could help! I never had the time to go through and get it passing the tests.Thanks for finishing that up!

[aahung]

I live in Hong Kong and I don't use Pandora very often. But, yep I will be here to help fix something if I can.

[nriley]

Okay, merged and listening to the new Hermes at the moment! Updated the release notes too. Next thing I think we need to work on is getting the Web site updated and making a release. I've never actually done a release myself but can track down some info that @winny- and @alexcrichton sent me.

[nriley]

OK, I fixed a bunch more stuff (please keep in mind this is not sustainable for me) and built a beta. Can't figure out how to upload it to S3 at the moment, but here it is on my Web site: https://sabi.net/temp/Hermes-1.2.7b1.zip.

If this works for people, I'll release it and then hopefully hand over the reins to someone(s) else.

[obycode]

I've been playing with it this morning and it works great.

[patricklewis]

I haven't encountered any problems with 1.2.7b3 so far, nice work!

[nriley]

OK, 1.2.7 is released with a bunch of changes — thanks to everyone who contributed. I still need to document the release process, which has changed (for the better, I think — everything is now hosted on GitHub rather than S3). Barring any catastrophic issues, I hope this will be good enough for a while to give some other folks a chance to get up to speed.

[cpowell]

Thumbs up to everyone who contributed to 1.2.7. Thanks very much for keeping this great app alive.

[nriley]

The release process is now documented. Let me know or post to this issue when you're ready for 1.2.8 or 1.3.0 or whatever and I'll make the necessary project changes.

[nriley]

I have done a bit more cleanup and fixed a bunch more bugs, including a regression introduced in 1.2.7, which will hopefully give the app a bit more time to find its footing with other maintainers.

Sorry to abuse this issue, but I imagine the participants have some interest in Hermes. Please test and file issues with any problems, particularly regressions!

Download: https://github.com/HermesApp/Hermes/releases/tag/v1.2.8b4

Changelog: https://github.com/HermesApp/Hermes/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

[sammcj]

May I may a suggestion that given all the great work that @nriley has done for Hermes - that the project gets moved to his Github as the 'main' maintainer?

[nriley]

I appreciate the thought, but please no — the point of a lot of my work and doing things like documenting the release process was to make it easier for other people to get involved. I made a pile of cleanups/fixes in the last couple months because I had a lighter-than-usual work schedule, but I do not expect this to continue in the future and I also have a lot of my own open-source software that needs work. I did start using Hermes again myself which certainly contributed to my enthusiasm, though!

Hopefully some other folks can continue to pitch in. I think the code is in pretty good shape at this point, there are a bunch of open tickets, and I’m more than happy to answer questions going forward. Particularly there seem to be some signifcant crashing bugs with the 10.12 beta I don't know if/when I'll have time to address as I don't even have a 10.12 install right now (#258).

[AdibMurshed]

Hello @winny- @HermesApp @nriley ! I am Adib Murshed, the President of the Iniftar Foundations. I would like to claim this project to continue its development, open-source and non-profit.

[winny-]

Hello, make sure to highlight @nriley - he's the guy to talk to. Best of luck :)

[AdibMurshed]

@nriley

[nriley]

Thanks @winny- - was on vacation. The comment you responded to was deleted and I could never figure out what it was about in any case... FYI for anyone else, if you want to start contributing, just do so, you don't need to ask permission :-)

[Raab70]

@nriley I would be interested in contributing. Objective-C is not my forte but I can handle smaller issues especially if someone else just wants to review my work. I tackled a simple issue (#320) to get started.

[pmetzger]

What's the deal with maintenance at this point?

[nriley]

I still don’t have the free time to spend to do Hermes justice. I have done a lot to make the project easily buildable and accessible and am happy to offer assistance getting set up, though I think if you don’t have some Cocoa experience this would not be a great starting project. Otherwise work will come very slowly or not at all.

On Oct 23, 2018, at 2:54 PM, Perry E. Metzger notifications@github.com wrote:

What's the deal with maintenance at this point?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[pmetzger]

But has anyone else been given commit rights over the app so they can maintain things, merge pull requests, etc.?

[dtseto]

But has anyone else been given commit rights over the app so they can maintain things, merge pull requests, etc.?

Just fork it and do pull requests? People who want to maintain it and take over the project might also add malware to it.

[nriley]

But has anyone else been given commit rights over the app so they can maintain things, merge pull requests, etc.?

Just fork it and do pull requests? People who want to maintain it and take over the project might also add malware to it.

Agreed, if you want to work on it, just fork it and get started; there have been some pretty high-profile cases of the malware thing recently when bad actors are added as contributors.

I'm in a slightly better place to handle contributions than I was a few years ago, but don't have enough time/ability to resume actively maintaining Hermes — though I use it daily. I'd only recommend doing this if you're a competent Cocoa developer already.