Identify issues that once fixed, will promote contribution to the project

[duncanturk]

There were no commits in the last 6 month and no other contributions from the people behind turtl.
Is the Project abandoned or dead? @orthecreedence @rubbingalcoholic

[D4nte]

Oh no, I just started to try it out. Interestingly, last admin post in community is about the premium option... https://community.turtlapp.com/u/andrew/activity

[rubbingalcoholic]

Turtl is not abandoned, but we are severely limited by budget right now - this has to be a side project for us. The combination of being free software and not spying on our users makes it difficult to find commercial investors, so we are doing this on our own. We have upcoming improvements to the client, it's just slow going with most of our time occupied on another project right now. I hope this changes soon, and we definitely intend to keep Turtl afloat in the meantime. The premium option helps with that, we're at least not bleeding out as quickly.

[D4nte]

Turtl is not abandoned, but we are severely limited by budget right now - this has to be a side project for us. The combination of being free software and not spying on our users makes it difficult to find commercial investors, so we are doing this on our own. We have upcoming improvements to the client, it's just slow going with most of our time occupied on another project right now. I hope this changes soon, and we definitely intend to keep Turtl afloat in the meantime. The premium option helps with that, we're at least not bleeding out as quickly.

Have you considered lowering the barriers of contributions (see #343)?

As part of the Hacktoberfest '19 (as a maintainer) I read a number of good posts about making it easy for contributors to contributes. Some of what I remember:

• Flag easy issues (I think you already do it)
• Easy to setup dev env (ie, removing obstacles in the way of a first contribution)
• Easy way to reach maintainers (Gitter, IRC, etc)

The posts may still be available at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details

[duncanturk]

Just reopened it because I agree with @D4nte.
Lowering the hurdles for contribution would help to enable the community to implement features and fix bugs. So you (@rubbingalcoholic) just need to spend time on project orchestration.
There are other issues that refer to contribution hurdles like #210 fixing those would enable the users to keep the project alive.
People move away from this project and no new will join if there are multiple month without code changes. For them the project is basically dead (even if it's not officially dead).

What I think you/we could do about this is

1. Identify issues that hinder codecontributions
2. Mark them as important with their own tag or a milestone
3. Fix them. I think you (the maintainers) know best how to setup dev environments for the subprojects. So documenting how you itended to develop these projects would be the most efficient. If there is no time for this, maybe someone in the community came up with an solution. So step 2. is of high importance to enable people (who want to contribute and help the project) to find the important issues. So they can document their workflow and setup.

Do you think you can invest some time into this?
Thanks

[orthecreedence]

The biggest issue I can see to contributions to the app's frontend right now would be finishing #52. I did initially make some progress here, but have gotten pulled away by other things. If we can build the core as a WASM module, then we can enable local browser development of the frontend and even release a web version of Turtl (which would need to have a plethora of security warnings).

That said, a large portion of the app's logic is in the core, and while rust makes getting this up and running fairly easy (via rustup/cargo) there's not going to be an easier way to get started other than getting rust and compiling the app. We do have a project that has Docker builds for our production releases: https://github.com/turtl/buildo. These can be used as references for building the core (and the desktop app itself as well) for non-windows, non-OSx platforms. Windows/OSx are difficult to automate, although perhaps making an appveyor/travis build for windows/osx could serve as a reference and potentially weed out any issues with the builds.

In general, more automated tests on the frontend would be very welcome, but once again it's much easier to develop the frontend if you can just spin up a browser, vs having to have rust and electron and a million build scripts.

I'm completely on board with making things easier for people to start up dev on Turtl. #52 is going to be the one that gets us the furthest. Help/ideas/contributions there are more than welcome. I've changed the title of this issue as well.

Thanks, everyone, for weighing in.