Maintaining my first project: part I

on captainepoch's log

Since I started using Pleroma I used Husky to see and post stuff. But the application is not perfect, and it has some bugs (some of them very annoying). Given that I worked as an Android developer for the past two years, I think I can maintain the project.

But… This is also my first time maintaining a project in the Free and Open Source Software community.

Asking the author to maintain the project

The first thing I did before opening the project at Sourcehut was to ask the actual maintainer for his permission to “take over” the project. I also told him that the project will be hosted at Sourcehut.

From here, I want to thank him for letting me even keep the name of the application. I really appreciate it!

Link to the project

The project (including the source code and the mailists) is at sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky.

Getting started

First of all, I had to know the license of the project. Lucky me it is the GNU GPL v3, so I do know the license and the terms of it. The new code will be under the same license given that I want to keep Husky as a Free Software project.

Since there is a lot of work to do in the application, I feel that some of the changes may be a derivative work from the original, others may be not. I would really want to remove the “This file is a part of Tusky.” in the license notice for the derivative work, since it would not be from that project anymore, but I am not sure I can do it.

If anyone has any knowledge about if I could do that, please send me an email (you have my contact info at adol.pw/contact). If you want to have this conversation at a public space, send an email to lists.sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky-devel.

Documentation

Every project has a minimum of documentation in case people want to start hacking or building the project. I started to make some of it today.

General info

This is the Husky doc. website. There is some basic information on the project, and more will be added in time.

Setting up the ‘Contributing’ guide

To get contributions in a standard way a maintainer should have a “Contributing” section in the documentation of the project. Today I did the first version of this guide for Husky and you can see it at Contributing to Husky.

Setting up the ‘Building’ guide

At this time, as it says at Building Husky this is not ready at this very moment. It will be, so stay tunned!

Releases

My intention is to release a first version of the project as soon as possible.

I have to figure out how to put it on F-Droid in the future, because there is a Husky release already.

… and this is just the beginning

For the moment there is not much done in the project.

I suggest you to subscribe to the mailists of the project (you can find the information at Mailists). The communication will be done there. There is not an official Pleroma account in the fediverse for the project at this very moment.

I will be making more posts of this journey. This is the first time that I contribute to the Free Software community, and everything is new for me. My intention is to tell my experience along tips that help me to manage everything in the best possible way.

See you on Part II!