Project appears to be dead?

[romanholidaypancakes]

The author has not been online for a year, any PR needs his approval.
vscode-git-graph/blob/develop/LICENSE Also restricts others from doing maintenance

[vkv]

@mhutchie could the license be less restrictive, e.g. to allow forks?

There no nice alternatives AFAIK for private repo use:

• Git Lens requires plus subscription for the graph feature
• Git History offers really limited context actions via the graph

[bvandevliet]

I'm also worried the project is dead, I know there are some good PR's and worthy active issues to improve this extension far more. It would be a waste if those are not picked up. Or if someone has the time, ambition and permission to publish and maintain an official fork (@vkv perhaps? ;)), that would also be great. I would say this extension is too good to let go!

@mhutchie I hope you're well and healthy! Please give us a clue about your future plans for Git Graph so we could act on that if that is the way forward :)

[Sam-Lin-MillersLab]

If the author hasn't been online for a year, I am more worried about his wellbeing at this point.

[Chrismettal]

I have been trying to contact him about this as well. Would love to see additional people with write access, or a license that allows forking, whatever @mhutchie's preference would be.

[sbhutch]

Please post an update if you manage to establish contact @Chrismettal

[iamfraggle]

If the author hasn't been online for a year, I am more worried about his wellbeing at this point.

For what it's worth, his LinkedIn was updated in April.

[zanminkian]

An alternative I found: https://github.com/raymon-sun/vscode-git-history. Clean and easy to use, but it seems that cannot show diffs between different commits.

[Chrismettal]

After not being able to establish contact in any way I have asked Github support for a transfer of ownership, or the addition of another collaborator with push access.
I am sure we can find someone to carry the torch if Github is able to transfer.

[Sam-Lin-MillersLab]

I don't think that is possible. The best thing we can do is forking this.

[ugudango]

Wouldn't forking be a violation of the license? I'm assuming they wouldn't be pursuing legal action, seeing that they abandoned this. There will be problems with publishing the extension to the store, though.

Putting out releases would still be considered "publishing derivative works", so what's left is to fork and ask the users of the updated extension to compile the extension themselves.

[Sam-Lin-MillersLab]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to use,
copy, modify, merge, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

Permission is NOT GRANTED to publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
derivative works of the Software.

Not sure if fork is distributing

[Turiok]

Hi everyone,

His last message on his discord came from 02/09/2022. He is very occupied right now but think to improve the extension. And think to add maintainers if motivated one.
So do not steal (even for the good cause) and let him make a pause if he wants one.
At least, he seems healthy. And it's the best news :)

[bvandevliet]

That's very good news! And of course he can take a break, but we weren't informed that was the case until now. And I'm glad to hear he is (most probably) in good health! :)

Maybe a bit off topic, but I want to mention a feature request that I pulled some time ago (#438), because I think the extension vscode-git-history (as mentioned in this comment above) solved this quite nicely. Namely, it has the git graph in the lower area where the terminal also lives and shows the file diffs in the main area. This way we can browse file diffs more easily since we don't need to switch between the file diff tab and the git graph tab anymore. I'd suggest we could have the best of these both extensions combined! :)

[gtnIIS]

I also appreciate the response, as mentioned by @Turiok and am happy, that the project apparently is not dead. Still, I guess it'd be a great advantage for everyone to have a couple of maintainers added so all the PRs and issues do not have to be on standby.

@mhutchie please let us know how we can revive this great project wrt to your being otherwise occupied at the moment.

[ghost]

great news @Turiok thanks for letting us know.

[MurtadhaInit]

It's been 5 months now. The last commit was on September 2021.
Should we assume the project is not going to be maintained anymore?

[ghost]

no @MurtadhaInit look above at the reply from @Turiok

[gtnIIS]

@Caasi-dev I think everybody saw the post of @Turiok but still I don't really see @mhutchie coming back anytime soon. So to actually just answer @MurtadhaInit s question: yes, currently the project is not maintained and - as you can see - nobody knows if or when the owner plans to come back or assign somebody else to maintain it.

[jankap]

Would there be volunteers to maintain the project? We could ask @mhutchie directly since he seems to be active on other platforms.

[tontus]

Would there be volunteers to maintain the project? We could ask @mhutchie directly since he seems to be active on other platforms.

I'm happy to volunteer.

[jankap]

So, since we would have maintainer with @tontus , is somebody who had contact to @mhutchie able to make him aware?

[anthonypillot]

By the way, do you have any news about the project's recovery? @jankap @tontus

[tontus]

Not yet, Waiting for some direction to start. @anthonypillot

[Turiok]

Sadly any answer from @mhutchie on its Discord.
I seen only once time connected on it. But he went offline as soon as I wrote on the channel.
A fork will be nice but against the license I think.

[MarkJeronimus]

Yes unfortunately, it's perfectly fine to include MIT licensed components in a project, and distribute it as non-open-source. Yes that's right, this project is not open source according to the definition, since the definition demands derived works.

Someone could, once communication is re-established, ask him to reconsider the open-source-ness. Maybe he's just not even aware his project is not open source?

[burekas7]

Any progress?

[mindplay-dk]

progress on what?

@mhutchie vanished from Github more than a year ago - no one else has access to this repo 😔

[bvandevliet]

I just noticed that the extension had been updated (2023-10-10, 11:18:07) in my Visual Studio Code. However, I don't see any recent commit activity in this repo. Does anyone know what is going on? Is there some other build pipeline outside of this repo that we're not aware of? Is there hope??

EDIT:
Or my vscode just performed an update to the latest release of 2021-04-05, 05:44:22 only a few years later :\

[fungiboletus]

The last update was in April 2021 according to the visual studio marketplace.

[mindplay-dk]

@bvandevliet there's a fake version of the extension listed, maybe that's what you installed?

[bvandevliet]

No it's the same extension I use for years already. My best guess is a years delayed update by vscode. Still weird though..

[theArianit]

@bvandevliet I have seen that vscode does this for other extensions too. It looks to me it shows the date of the latest vscode update and not the one of the extension itself.

[mindplay-dk]

not sure what you mean, then? there were tags past the date of the last release, I guess these were never actually released.

[mindplay-dk]

Here's a diff of all the unreleased changes: v1.30.0...v1.31.0-beta.3

By the way, another version of the potentially "fake" extension I mentioned was just released:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=LinJun.git-graph-pro

It's difficult to say whether this is actually someone attempting to fork and maintain the extension, or just adding malware, because he didn't change any of the metadata links - everything still points to this repository. I've tried Github and Google searches, and can't find this mysterious "LinJun" or any fork, so whether he's doing something nefarious or not, it seems he does know he's not supposed to be doing that and prefers to stay anonymous... 🤔

[laterz]

Can anyone contact the author for any response???
come on~~~baby!!!

[Guddi11]

Alright folks, I just bought a linkedin premium trial to be able to send a message to @mhutchie. I really hope, that he will respond and of course I will let you know asap :) I asked him to either assign maintainers or change the license to allow for a fork.
Keep fingers crossed, that he answers...

[pohlt]

I think I did exactly the same many months (years?) ago to no avail (and never mentioned it here, sorry). Hopefully, you are more successful, @Guddi11 !

[laterz]

Thank you vvvvvvvvvvery much!!!@Guddi11 @pohlt
Maybe X or Facebook or Twitter or Youtobe or PhoneNumber or Address (seems crazy,should respect privacy)
But there is no trace to obtain these contact information in order to contact @mhutchie

[wdzeng]

This extension is very elegant and helpful. Appreciate @mhutchie and hope he is being well.

[piradata]

cant we just fork and ignore the license? the @mhutchie seems not to care much as he is unaccessible, and if he sends a message to complain about the fork that is even better because we will know he is alive and well

[MarkJeronimus]

In short: No.

In long: No. The term here is "orphaned works" and it's a can of worms that's more suited for lawyers. You'd have to submit the work to some government office, give the copyright holder 90 days to come forth, etc. And that's only just the procedure for audio recordings. (I didn't spot any other procedure.) Even Google had to pay tens of millions in settlement when it published orphaned books on Google Books.

Some more background here

[maxisam]

It is also more than just legal issue. It is the line we shouldn't cross in OSS. If you want the feature, there are paid option out there. GitLens is a solid choice. or you can just rewrite the project but not just copy paste. Feel like it isn't that hard when we can see the code here already.

[tontus]

Can we start an initiative of rewriting the project? There are money developers here. I know we all are busy, but if everyone manage to contribute a little bit, I think we can make it work. It is very hurting to see such a good OSS project to die.

[pohlt]

Keep in mind that the project was licensed under an OSS license for most of the time. We wouldn't have to go back to commit 1, but to the last commit under the permissive license.

[phil294]

I've built https://github.com/phil294/git-log--graph/ mostly for this purpose 1-2 years ago. It's somewhat stable but a lot to do and WIP (in fact I am working on it again right now), so any new contributors will be welcome. Issues help a lot too, in particular on UI improvements. Eventually the issue tracker of this mhutchie's project might be a good guideline for future features too.

Not trying to demotivate other fresh attempts at this though, more competition is always good!

cant we just fork and ignore the license?

You shouldn't. (But you could) But then again it won't stay on the VSCode Marketplace for long anyway. MS has repeatedly shown that they honor this project's license and have removed published forks.

[JulioC]

Keep in mind that the project was licensed under an OSS license for most of the time. We wouldn't have to go back to commit 1, but to the last commit under the permissive license.

This is a good point! Up to commit 3ba4217 the License didn't include the phrase "Permission is NOT GRANTED to publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell derivative works of the Software.".

It even stated "Permission is hereby granted ... including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell" as in the standard MIT license.

The diff from that version to master appears to be large though: 3ba4217...master

[carwyn]

Seems that 7e4ccb3 made the initial licence change, with the fragment in question also moving around in later commits.

Also see the LICENSE file history: https://github.com/mhutchie/vscode-git-graph/commits/develop/LICENSE

[JulioC]

Looks like I mixed up the hashes. Anyway, the diff between that version and master is still ~350 commits long

[Keavon]

I suggest we all show our support for this VS Code feature request for reimplementing Git Graph as a built-in official feature:

microsoft/vscode#179053

Give that original post a 👍 and consider leaving a comment. This would be the ideal outcome so the actual VS Code team can make it a first-class feature and provide ongoing maintenance. But it needs to get a few hundred more thumbs up votes to get traction, so please go do that!

[theArianit]

I've found that someone forked this repo

[mindplay-dk]

I've found that someone forked this repo

uh yeah. this is the only commit: fyzhu@875caa1

and no, that's not allowed under the license! 😐

[carwyn]

Thankfully it looks like the built-in support for a git graph is fast catching up to this extension, with support for extensions to build on top of it coming too:

• Create new built in git graph microsoft/vscode#179053

[mindplay-dk]

Oh wow! I never even looked at this panel, didn't realize this was more than a flat list of commits! This looks really promising - it's really already at the point where I could probably get used to this instead. Awesome! Finally! ✌️😄