automaticmode / active_workflow

Polyglot workflows without leaving the comfort of your technology stack.
https://www.activeworkflow.org
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Contribute back to Huginn? #2

Closed cantino closed 4 years ago

cantino commented 4 years ago

Hey folks, this looks like an awesome fork of Huginn, with some nice API additions. What made you decide not to contribute back upstream?

vidas commented 4 years ago

Hi Andrew—thank you for the positive feedback! It's very kind of you.

To answer your question: we wanted to focus on business use and to have the liberty to introduce breaking changes in order to carry out our vision. Thus, ActiveWorkflow is incompatible with Huginn, supports a smaller segment of agents and leans towards API-based usage as you correctly observed. We are currently in the process of rewriting some core parts and we plan to publish a roadmap for ActiveWorkflow at the beginning of next year.

With that said, we whole-heartedly believe Huginn is a stellar choice for the majority of users out there, as are some other popular OSS projects in the space of automation. We merely hope to satisfy a niche and to do it well. :-)

Thank you again for your kind comments and of course for your work which has been valuable and inspirational to us and many others in the community. If it's OK I will close this issue as it's not directly related to any development issues, but please feel free to email me directly if you would like a more in-depth explanation.

cantino commented 4 years ago

Thanks @vidas. That's of course completely fine with our open source license. You can do whatever you'd like with the code. That said, are you open to contributing some of the API improvements upstream?

virtadpt commented 4 years ago

Like the Remote Agents code, perhaps? Please?

vidas commented 4 years ago

We are definitely open to contributing upstream.

REST(ish) API feature, for example, can be quite easily ported to Huginn.

Remote Agent API is very different though. It assumes a simplified Agent model. If ported to Huginn as is, remote agents would become third-class citizens. Remote agents have no Liquid templating, no File support, can't be "long-running" agents. They talk to other agents exclusively through messages (which is not the case with Huginn). Some of these features will come back but in a very different and incompatible way. ActiveWorkflow can afford to have breaking changes at this stage, but I don't think this would be an appropriate solution for Huginn.

Why not create a Huginn issue to discuss how and what could be done with regards to remote agents? We should definitely strive to have at least some compatibility where possible.