General update issue

[Miccio-AN]

Given that:

1. I love this software
2. In the past I have already made two donations in different times
3. I guess the author has anything else to do

I was wondering if this software was still developed or has been abandoned (considering that the latest version dates back to almost a year ago)

Thanks anyway for everything!
Merry Christmas!

[peterlevi]

Hi @Miccio-AN.

Variety is neither super-actively developed, nor has been abandoned.
It is in a state that is fairly feature-rich and more or less stable, albeit, with the vast number of different DEs and downloading sources it now supports, there has definitely been some decay over time.
I don't have a ton of time to devote to it, it's not a project that gets my daily attention anymore, so it doesn't really get massive new updates, but I still try to, from time to time, revisit issues and open PRs, fix whatever hot bugs have accrued, do some maintenance. From time to time I also find enthusiasm to implement some bigger change or improvement, and "batches" of bigger changes will probably continue happening in the future too, broken by longer moments of "silence".

@jlu5, who is the main other maintainer, has also done a tremendous amount of work to keep Variety going - thanks a lot!
The community is also decently active with helping fix some of the most problematic issues when they happen.

Unfortunately some aspects of Variety have shown to not be sufficiently "long-term feasible" and require more timely involvement than I can provide - for example all the sources that rely on an API key and rely us to apply some request throttling have been very difficult to "keep happy" without having a server-side component, and currently some of them are broken. I had also long ago found out that I don't have capacity to test and support more than one OS version + DE combination (the one I personally use), which means that for any other OS/DE, I rely on the community to keep things running.

Also some of the technology it has been built upon has evolved (e.g. GTK concepts changed), and some tech debt has accrued, and development now is maybe harder than when I started the project. Glade used to be way easier than now for creating/editing UI dialogs. It's generally time for a bigger refresh/redesign/simplification, but I don't see myself doing one any time soon. Maybe at some point I'll find the energy for this.

Variety has also been "sharing" the "open-source development" time I can afford with Ojo (https://github.com/peterlevi/ojo), which is a project that I mostly develop for my own personal needs, and for which I have bigger uses myself than for Variety.

[jlu5]

I will give my perspective as well:

I joined Variety as a comaintainer around 2017, and my focus since has been mostly on packaging for Debian, as well as keeping Variety up to date with new releases of Python and major desktop environments. I am also in the same boat in that this is one of many projects I try to take care of in my spare time, but there's a couple other factors that limit my involvement:

• I'm less familiar with Variety's code as a whole. I haven't had much experience with GUI programming with GTK, for instance, and familiarity is something that also fades with time.
• In its current state, Variety already has many more features than I personally use in my day-to-day. Beyond the basics like downloading things, loading local folders, and supporting my DE, I'm not personally too attached to the other features. I definitely understand how other people enjoy them though :)

These factors mean I'm less inclined to review major feature additions or invasive changes to the codebase. Unfortunately this means that bigger PRs sometimes sit idle for a while; at the end of the day we're just lacking the bandwidth for them.

That said, one goal I have that I would appreciate folks' help with is to get the number of untriaged issues down: https://github.com/varietywalls/variety/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+no%3Alabel has just over 5 pages currently. There's really a bit of everything here, from feature requests to reports of things not working on certain desktop environments. It's a big ask to chase everything down.

(Finally for transparency purposes, I am not connected to the donations process. Nor am I comfortable with soliciting anything given my current level of activity)