Fork notty to ocaml-community

[MisterDA]

Propose to move a project to ocaml-community

Project name: notty

Initial author(s): David Kaloper Meršinjak (@pqwy)

Current URL:

• https://github.com/pqwy/notty
• https://github.com/ocaml-dune/notty

License: ISC License

Description: Declarative terminal graphics for OCaml

Do the current maintainer(s) agree with the move:
The current maintainer has not updated the project in the past 3 years, and has not responded to public or private contact attempts in the past month. See pqwy/notty#53.

New maintainer: I volunteer as a maintainer. Possible interested persons include Dune maintainers.
cc @shonfeder @punchagan @Leonidas-from-XIV @Alizter @favonia

One community fork has already happened under the Dune umbrella. Dune developers have expressed privately that they may not have the necessary bandwidth to review patches to notty that are not affecting Dune itself. I propose we adopt notty as it currently is under the Dune fork (it has only a few compatibility and feature patches above upstream), merge the few pending patches, and release on opam.

[toots]

If you are volunteering as maintainer, I don't see any issue with it.

One thing that was explained is the potential importance of the package for the community at large?

[MisterDA]

It's my understanding that notty is (one of?) the go-to library for text user interfaces (TUI) in OCaml. Upstream is missing Windows support, and Dune devs and I independently wrote patches to support it. Dune devs have added more features to support colors and terminal features, and new OCaml versions.
Notty is notably being used in:

• bechamel_notty, a simple tool to generate a CLI output with notty which shows results from bechamel's benchmarks (as core_bench);
• hardcaml_waveterm, a terminal based digital waveform viewer for Hardcaml;
• Ascend, a simple, yet fun terminal RPG;
• docfd, TUI multiline fuzzy document finder;
• meio, Monitor Eio programs.
• it is also a dependency of Lwd/Nottui.

Looking at the dependencies I'm also cc-ing @darrenldl @let-def @m-laniakea to let them know of the possible change of maintenance, and ask whether they could be interested in co-maintenance.

[dinosaure]

I'm also interesting about the maintainance of this package due to my usage for, as you said, bechamel but also some personal projects with miou and unikernels in general 👍

[shonfeder]

I'm happy to help maintain. Further support for its importance in the community may be gathered from https://github.com/search?q=language%3Aocaml+notty&type=code

[toots]

That sounds pretty healthy. Let's wait a little bit to see if there are other opinions. Otherwise we should proceed with the move.

[Alizter]

I am the dune dev in question and I support supporting this package independently if the original author is no longer available.

[darrenldl]

Tagging @faldor20 as they also use notty in jj_tui and also maintains a nottui fork with picos support (if I recall correctly).

[toots]

Well this all sounds pretty healthy and needed to me. I'm cool with making the move since nobody has objected so far and a lot of support was expressed.

Shall we try to move the https://github.com/ocaml-dune/notty repo here? That would be the best way to ensure continuity for this who are using it already I imagine?

[dinosaure]

I think all people are not totally in-sync with what dune's people did. It will be better to take pqwy/notty and redo PRs done into ocaml-dune/notty but with a consensus.

[toots]

If that's the consensus I'm happy to do that as well.

[Alizter]

I agree. ocaml-dune/notty is dune's own vendored copy of the original notty repo so any patches there are not "official". These can be upstreamed if needed at a later date, but it should be orthogonal to the work on notty itself.

[toots]

Cool. I have created a fork of the original repository and added @MisterDA as admin. I'll let y'all do the rest, let me know if there's anything else we can do.

[Alizter]

https://github.com/ocaml-community/notty

[Alizter]

We should enable issues there so we can discuss.