Oct 7, 2026, 1:30 PMI have spent more than 20 years making sure my contributions can be replaced, and proposing processes that should survive my presence in a project. I don't plan on living forever, and sure as hell I'm not planning on being irreplaceable. I leave "après moi, le déluge" to egotistical wankers.
Oct 7, 2026, 1:30 PMIf a project cannot survive without specific people then that project should not survive.
Oct 8, 2026, 3:40 AM@ebassi guess pidgin should be gone then?
Oct 8, 2026, 8:05 AMOct 8, 2026, 3:10 PM@ebassi @lazarus We've been trying to prepare for it forever. I am the 8th lead and someone who has is not active but has a history with the project has access to everything.
The bigger issue that we've struggled with forever is getting and maintaining contributors. Not many people are interested in contributing for free and facing potential legal threats because of it.
We've tried many avenues to fix this, but nothing seems to help and all attempts cut into dev time which doesn't help either.
Oct 8, 2026, 8:03 AM@grimmy that’s not the question. The real question is: did you leave behind enough documentation and processes to allow somebody to take over from you in case you leave, or did you plan for the project to be buried with you, like the pharaohs of old with their possessions?
Oct 8, 2026, 3:21 PM@ebassi I'd hope so. Also as I mentioned in my other response I'm the 8th lead of the project. So we have done this numerous times before.
The problem is, as it has always been with forking gaim/pidgin, that the project requires way more work than anyone realizes.
These posts help explain the issue a bit more.
https://dev.to/grim/whats-taking-so-long-with-pidgin-3-1g6i
https://dev.to/grim/pidgins-architecture-4pna
https://dev.to/grim/protocolservice-agnosticism-in-purple-3-d5i
What I'm trying to say is there's all sorts of reasons for a project to depend on a very few number of people.
Oct 8, 2026, 4:01 PM@grimmy you cannot read the last toot in a thread without taking into consideration the rest of the thread: I'm specifically referring to people feeling stuck in a community—intentionally or not—without planning for their departure; if the premise doesn't apply to Pidgin, then the conclusion doesn't apply either
Oct 8, 2026, 5:33 PM@ebassi I took over the lead position to fix something I pushed for that I believe was one of the main reasons that stalled the project for so long. We're just now starting to make progress after fixing that error and paying back all the tech debt that came from the decision.
That decision was making libpurple a gobject based library. In hindsight from the last 18 years.. creating a new library would have been a better move but there's so much history for pidgin/purple that it had to be fixed.