Concerns Regarding the Inactivity of narou

[kiuyten56]

Hello.

This repository is almost inactive. While there are commits to private repositories in whiteleaf7's GitHub account, this repository is effectively dead. Fortunately, several volunteers have submitted pull requests for urgent issues(*1~5), but there is no sign of response.

Respect for whiteleaf7, who has maintained narou so far, is there. However, considering the current situation, can we expect future prospects? Shouldn't we focus on the fork version by other volunteers, rather than this repository?

I think it's necessary to reduce various troubles that new users may encounter and make it easier to manage.

*1, *2, *3, *4, *5

[kokotaro]

This is my personal opinion, but I had never considered moving to another forked version because I believe that whiteleaf7 is currently only slowing down its maintenance due to a busy private life.

I think it is inconvenient but acceptable that the various pull requests are not reflected as a result of running gem install narou.

What specific problems do you feel you are having? Is there a lack of English documentation? Or are the conditions for applying patches described only in Japanese, so the appropriate patch is unknown?

[kiuyten56]

While I cannot deny the lack of documentation or the outdated feel, it is not a major issue.

The problem I want to present is the stagnation of the repository. I understand that whiteleaf7 is busy with his personal life. Although he commented to issues, this is a repository where no commits have been made to any branch for two years. And I think he could give write access to others or take other measures.This is GitHub.

Some novel websites have undergone changes, a certain degree of responsiveness is important in keeping up. shouldn't we move the base while there are motivated volunteers fork? If whiteleaf7 returns and both the volunteers and whiteleaf7 allow it, the original can be merged.

In any case, my point is that it is troublesome and problematic to have to search through the issue sections or releases of volunteer repositories one by one to resolve issues.

I do not have any authority. I am just a user. I am merely suggesting,"Isn't this a problem?" nothing more than that. I also understand that the fact that there has been no movement on forks so far likely means there will be none in the future as well

[Rich-Richie]

I agree with kiuyten's concern. As of now, there are already three separate patches, each fixing separate problems. (one for ToC pagination problem, one for the epub converter problem, and another one, an anti-bot circumvention method for narou). I didn't experience too much trouble because I followed the discussion in real-time, but newcomers will have a lot of catching up to do, if they weren't already leaving because this thing don't work at all out-of-the-box anymore. It is already bad how the current gem version can't be used to download from narou and kakuyomu anymore.

[Rich-Richie]

I just checked the fork list of this project and there are 16 of them. https://github.com/whiteleaf7/narou/forks

[kiuyten56]

Wonderful! He was alive❤️