Is this abandoned?

[DaniruKun]

Points for concern

• Plenty of plugins (e.g. https://github.com/matryer/xbar-plugins/pull/1463 )have been waiting to be added for over a year
• There is a queue of ~46 unmerged, ready to merge plugins
• The xbarapp.com website and plugin repository hasn't been updated since July 2021
• No updates from @matryer for months
• The plugin browser is missing essential features like search

What are the potential causes and what can be improved

I think the big issue is that the way plugins are managed is poor and could have been avoided, had the authors read about previous, established projects that involve community contributed bits of software. For example. ELPA, MELPA or even Brew! have a system of recipes, which are decoupled from authors and sources.

The big advantage of this system is that people simply contribute "pointers" to the actual sources of plugins / packages / formulas, so the burden of updating versions, maintaining the source and license is up to the authors, not the archive maintainers. If it takes months to add, let alone update a package in xbarapp, people will just stop contributing altogether. If it also takes half a year to update the website manually, and there is no search engine, then no one will even bother using Xbar.

Either Matt makes it clear that something is being done to improve and is looking for people to help with maintenance, or just marks the repo as Archive-only and makes it clear that he doesn't want to bother with maintaining this repo, and leaves it up to the community to decide on an alternative. The very first step as soon as the main plugin repo reached 15k stars should have been to move out into a separate Github Organization and elect 1-2 other admins.

[okalachev]

Just giving the rights of merging to someone who the author trusts would solve the problem. There is no need to review everything by one person.

[kishaningithub]

Hugo themes is also a great example of how to maintain pointers

https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemesSiteBuilder

[sprak3000]

@DaniruKun

Greetings. I recently came on board to address some of the issues you outlined. My initial focus is two-fold:

1. Merge in as many of the backlogged plugins as possible.
2. Address as many of the issues (like this one 😄 ) as possible.

Items like the website update, plugin search, etc. are not in my wheelhouse yet, but I hope I might lend some assistance in those areas once I've cleared up a large chunk of the issue / PR backlog.

[mietzen]

@sprak3000 I think It would be beneficial to pin a Issue with a roadmap and also create tickets you're working on / need help with and mark them with labels. I also would strongly recommend moving xbar and xbar-plugins into a organisation and add Github Actions for building/testing the app and the website.