Is this project maintained?

[afontenot]

I want to emphasize right at the outset that I don't believe project maintainers have any kind of obligation to the community to continue working on a project. I'm very grateful for htop and all the work that has been put into it thus far.

I was recently surprised to notice that there haven't been any new commits to the project in over a year, and issues and pull requests are piling up. One in particular I'd very much like to see merged, adding support for PSS: #843

If the maintainer no longer has time or interest in working on the project, would they support additional community involvement, or possibly even a community supported fork, in order to get issues quashed and pull requests dealt with? I don't have the skill to do that, personally, but as htop is one of the most widely used sysadmin tools, I'm sure people would step up.

If this is just a temporary slowdown in time to work on the project, I'd be happy to hear that too! Thanks again for htop!

[Jesin]

I have wondered about this for a while now. My pull request #917 is a simple 1-line fix for a leak of FILE objects. I have been using a version of htop with that patch applied since I submitted the pull request 9 months ago. I've also applied #981 since then. htop is still by far the best program for its job that I have ever encountered, and I'd like to thank the old maintainer for all their work on it. I also would like to know if they're OK, if they have any plans to continue maintaining it, or if we should find a new maintainer.

[etosan]

Maybe contributors with most patches accepted could step up and then try to approach Hisham? His activities bar is mostly green, maybe he doesn't have time anymore?

[polluks]

Maybe we should switch to https://github.com/XPhyro/htop-xphyro?

[DarthGandalf]

Or any other of the 604 forks here: https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/network
There are updates in some of them in June and July

[natoscott]

Maybe we should switch to https://github.com/XPhyro/htop-xphyro?

This fork (or a fork it forked from?) seems to have changed the license from GPLv2 to GPLv3, despite the original htop license being GPLv2-only.

[natoscott]

Or any other of the 604 forks here: https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/network

Would anyone else be interested in forming a group of maintainers? (rather than just a 1-person model)
I see someone (?) recently created a https://github.com/htop but did nothing with it so far.

I'd like to go through the Linux distro bug-fix patches and get them merged at least, and then complete the 3.0.0 release that @hishamhm started some time back...

$ git tag -l | tail
2.0.0
2.0.1
2.0.2
2.1.0
2.2.0
3.0.0beta1
3.0.0beta2
3.0.0beta3
3.0.0beta4
3.0.0beta5

... but I don't really want to be the only person working on this.

[polluks]

@DarthGandalf Well, not everyone who forks or commits wants to be a new maintainer.

[fasterit]

@hishamhm any comments?
TBH, I for my side would much prefer you to either continue maintaining htop yourself or accept a few co-maintainers into this repository.
I'm not to keen on competing patch queues and volatile upstreams.
DLange
(Debian maintainer of htop)

[etosan]

@natoscott - so do you consider yourself committed enough to lead group of alternative maintainers?

Maybe we should try friendly fork approach for some time and reach hishamhm later (for resync)?

[natoscott]

@etosan yes, I guess so. I tried contacting @hishamhm by email a couple weeks ago without reply.

My preference like everyone here I think would be to be sending PRs to Hisham, but if that's not an option I can take this on for now. I'd be more than happy to hand it back to Hisham if he has time for it in the future.

Is there anyone else available to help with maintenance? I'll attempt to make contact with github to find the person behind https://github.com/htop next and see if we can use that (still seems to be unused).

[fasterit]

@natoscott I tried to contact @hishamhm from the Debian side multiple times as well.

I don't know why we don't receive a reply and what the underlying issue is as he is frequently active in his business projects (which are hosted on Github as well).
So at least he's alive and working, which is good to know.

So - with the same reluctance that you express - @ginggs and me (DLange) are willing to support the fork. Getting /htop would be good to reduce the confusion that will happen for some time about what the "canonical" (sorry to Red Hat :)) upstream is.

[natoscott]

| So at least he's alive and working, which is good to know.

Yep, good to know - that's the most important thing.

| I'll attempt to make contact with github [...]

I've heard back from github - they say the "github.com/htop" account is indeed active, its just not publicly visible activity (presumably a paid account) - so we cannot use it.

In light of that news, I've gone ahead and registered the "htop.dev" domain and started setting up "github.com/htop-dev" starting from the last code and docs from @hishamhm ...

https://htop.dev
https://github.com/htop-dev

I've also done an initial review of the last ~2 years worth of pull requests. There are approximately 50 PRs(!) that are good candidates to be merged - clear bug fixes, and simple-or-in-demand features . :| I'll start working my way through those next.

| Is there anyone else available to help with maintenance?

@fasterit does "willing to support the fork" mean help with maintenance or mainly switching over to it in Debian? (i.e. do you want / need write access to the repo for development work?)

Is there anyone who has spent some time in the htop code and wants to specifically help maintain it? (respond to PRs, issues, etc). There must be folk who were involved in the various platform ports, at least ...?

Let me know and I'll start adding people into the organisation - I'm hoping to avoid the situation that if I can't keep it going in a few years for some reason that it stalls again.

[fasterit]

I've also done an initial review of the last ~2 years worth of pull requests. There are approximately 50 PRs(!) that are good candidates to be merged - clear bug fixes, and simple-or-in-demand features . :| I'll start working my way through those next.

Awesome, thank you very much!

| Is there anyone else available to help with maintenance?

@fasterit does "willing to support the fork" mean help with maintenance or mainly switching over to it in Debian? (i.e. do you want / need write access to the repo for development work?)

Yes, please add @ginggs and @fasterit to htop-dev. We should clean up the backlog first and then think about a new release.
If that turns out well, we'll package it for Debian and that way switch upstreams. Still not happy with this but it seems we have no better choice right now.

[natoscott]

Yes, please add @ginggs and @fasterit to htop-dev.

Done.

We should clean up the backlog first and then think about a new release.

+1 - since @hishamhm had created 5 'beta' tags for htop-3.0.0 already, I expect the first task will be to merge clear bug fixes, release 3.0.0 in a few weeks maybe (?), then circle back and (re-)consider feature work for subsequent releases.

Still not happy with this but it seems we have no better choice right now.

Agreed.

[gaod]

I'll keep contributing Ubuntu ppa & FreeBSD ports with new upstream.