State of the maintenance

[azmeuk]

I am opening this issue to discuss the current state of the maintenance.

I am part of a project that requires dependencies to be active libraries, and I cannot say if django-push-notifications is active, stable or dying. Ideally I would love some of the maintainers or people from @jazzband to share their thoughts here 🙏. This can also be a good place to call for help if new maintainers are needed.

The good things:

• The project is stable, there is no need for active development

The bad omens:

• The last release was 18 months ago, the one before was 3 years ago, and the one before was 7 years ago
• 134 issues are opened, in the past 12 months only 2 messages were written by people from jazzband
• Several issues about technical deprecation are not answered/fixed/closed: Use new FCM APIs #546 Switch over from GCM to FCM #618 Incompatible with Python 3.10 #622 does not work with python 3.10 #675
• Several PR fixing those issues are not reviewed : Generic FCM device convenience model #615 Add WebPush support for Safari #674
• Uncontroversial fixes are not merged: [pre-commit.ci] pre-commit autoupdate #669 Fix: HexadecimalField accepts non-hex values #672 Allow APNS tokens of variable length. #678

To summarize:

• Do you maintainers still have time to spend on this project?
• Do you need help with the maintenance?
• Would you recommend using this library?
• Would you recommend using alternatives?

cc @jamaalscarlett @Proper-Job @antwan
Related to #205

[koedal]

Thanks for posting this. It sure would be nice to know if the maintainers are evening considering fixing any of those issue.

[jamaalscarlett]

@azmeuk Thank you for this. Part of the reason @jleclanche moved the project to jazzband was to have more people able to review and merge PRs. I am currently reviewing PRs and issues, but I am a full-time dev and I don't have the bandwidth to manage the project by myself.

[azmeuk]

@jamaalscarlett thank you for your answer. To be clear, can this project be considered unmaintained at the moment?

With a quick look to the current issues, I see that the most problematic issue is #622, that blocks python 3.10 and python 3.11 users to use the library. A lot of the webpush issues are addressed by #674, so this is a good thing.
With python 3.10+ and WP Safari support, I suppose the maintenance need would be pretty low.

[jleclanche]

@azmeuk AFAIK this is not maintained very actively but again, that's why it's in Jazzband, to make it easier for new maintainers to onboard without extra assistance.

[jamaalscarlett]

@azmeuk AFAIK this is not maintained very actively but again, that's why it's in Jazzband, to make it easier for new maintainers to onboard without extra assistance.

Agreed. I am going to take a swing at updating FCM support to the new V1 api. I have never used the apns notifications so that work needs some volunteers.

[jamaalscarlett]

@azmeuk Version 3.0.2 has been released. Thank you @blighj for the webpush enhancements!