We need a new maintenance concept / an active maintainer

[hmeine]

As far as I know, the current situation is that @ukoethe (inventor, main developer and former maintainer) and I (former active contributor and still GitHub lurker) are no longer actively using VIGRA, and in particular, Ulli is no longer interested in maintenance.

However, VIGRA still does have a number of users, and I have seen quite some valuable contributions that await some maintainer testing & decision to merge them.

In January, we had a brief discussion here: #485 (comment)

I suggest to give at least one active contributor rights to this repository. (As an alternative, if people think it should no longer be located in Ullis personal GitHub space, we could also start a "vigra" organization and officially fork a community-maintained version. Personally, I would be fine with keeping the current location.)

Who wants to take on this responsibility? I offer to help and contribute my opinion where it makes sense, but I also no longer actively use VIGRA, and I have even stopped actively coding in C++, so my C++11 knowledge is just from reading so far. :-)

• @hmaarrfk is a very active OSS contributor in general and has opened some issues & PRs
• @k-dominik was mentioned by @hmaarrfk AFAICS
• @DerThorsten ?

I would love to get an official word here from @ukoethe as well.

[hmeine]

I should add something very important: Please do not feel purposely left out if I did not list you! I just wanted to ping a few people, but did not put too much effort into researching who could be other candidates. (I know there are more!)

[hmaarrfk]

I would be in favor of helping maintain this package. I'm not an expert at C but k-dominik and I have been having trouble with recent compilers so I would be interested in helping keep this package alive, at least for a little bit longer.

ALOT of our patches have been merged into master, so it would be good to have that be released as a new version.

[hmeine]

I have recently talked with @ukoethe and he was indeed open to new maintainers and just missed this discussion.

Ulli suggested that people willing to act as maintainers reach out to him by email. (Contact details can be found at https://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/vislearn/people/ullrich-koethe/ )