Is project stalled?

[XVilka]

Sorry for the annoyance, just saw no progress (new issues, pull requests, or their updates) for a few months. So I wonder if the project was abandoned/paused/stalled?

[cormacrelf]

That's a bit of a silly question, isn't it? "I noticed a lack of activity... is there no activity?" Yes. This isn't a project run by a company who might have ceased to fund it, it's just people who are trying something. Feel free to give it a crack!

[crlf0710]

@XVilka Hi!

From my personal perspective, i think it's fair to say the project is a little stalled at the moment. Personally the COVID-19 thing and becoming a rust-team member changed my life pace a little, and i really haven't put much effort into this oxidized branch of tectonic.

On the other hand, this fork has achieved its initial goal - to proof-of-concept that a portable pure-rust version of tectonic suite can exist, and to found out what problems are lying below. For example, we're still relying C-dependencies that has no Rust-equivalents crates, like libicu, libharfbuzz, libfreetype2, zlib, that is causing us problems from time to time. We can oxidize and rewrite parts of dvipdfmx, that will sometimes cause us little regressions but are fixable. The xetex-part, especially the double-converted code, are especially hard to maintain, we haven't found a good way other than rewriting to systematically improve them to idiomatic Rust code.

Saying so, personally i don't see this project abandoned at this time, i think it just takes some more thinking about what and how the next stage would be, and waiting on the Rust ecosystem making more progress at the same time. And i'm happy to continue to review new PRs and doing a little work from time to time on this.

[XVilka]

Thanks for such a detailed answer! I wish you the best and looking forward for this project and your other Rust endeavors. I personally think this project is very important in the long run, thus my question.

[XVilka]

I wish I could help with the code, but too busy to do so. On the other hand I can help by sending a bit of regular donation, should help with CI or whatever. Could you please kindly setup OpenCollective or GitHub Sponsors?

cc @burrbull

[burrbull]

I wish I could help with the code, but too busy to do so. On the other hand I can help by sending a bit of regular donation, should help with CI or whatever. Could you please kindly setup OpenCollective or GitHub Sponsors?

tectonic-on-arXiv CI now works stable enough. But it covers only docs from early 2017. So you could run it on some other data sample.

Talking about donate it makes sense to move this branch under https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/ organization (or create new?) and add this option to https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/contribute.html.
cc @pkgw

[crlf0710]

If there's anything i can help with, just leave me a message. In the past two months I'm still getting myself familar with TeX and its friends in my own way, but it's a slow process.

[pkgw]

1. I think it would be great to bring this work into the tectonic-typesetting GitHub organization in some fashion. Besides making it look more "official", I would be eager to add some folks as admins of the organization to have some backup in case I get hit by a bus.

2. From my perspective, the priority that I would like to push is figuring out how to establish a path towards actually merging this work into the mainline Tectonic tree. I don't have a good idea of how to approach this — which is at least partially from my failure to dig into the work that's actually happening in this branch.

3. I do have some now ideas about how to compartmentalize the C dependencies better, now that I've learned more about how Rust handles such things (cf. Figure out what to do with harfbuzz dependency - bundle it? tectonic-typesetting/tectonic#619) and also developed a workflow for managing monorepos that I'm finally satisfied with (namely, cranko). Work on this front might help with some of the issues mentioned above, plus help clarify the path for merging in the oxidation work in pieces.