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When a project is dying

This content was originally posted on KDE Blogs.

I don’t know if this happens to other out there, to start working on different thigs and then never make up them in a way that they are useful.

My ~/devel folder is getting bigger and bigger, with semi-working projects, and deprecated projects.

A part from knetload, which is not “my” in all senses, as I only took over maintenance from Ben, other projects I started are quite all dying.

Some of them are for KDE, for example I have the biorythm generator (kbioritmi), the MD5SUM/SFV verificator with creation ability never completed (kdigest), a try to create a segment downloader for KDE (kjet), a VisualBoyAdvance frontend (kvba), the latest release doesn’t compile at all, I need to refactor it a lot, also if I changed it a lot from my first version), a rom verifier (clrlinpro) wannabe clone of clrmamepro, never completed as I wasn’t able to find a clean way to work with zip files, and a IRC bot for quizzes written in QT with Postgres.

kbioritmi is quite a “toy” I use rarely, I only created it because the biorythm generation is a not easy algorythm in many languages, and when I started studying a new language I wrote a version of the generation in that language. I’m not caring too much if it’s going to die.

KVBA gave me some good times, as there aren’t so much VBA frontends for KDE, I haven’t saw updates to kvisualboyadvance in a lot of time. Anyway, also if I used to play a lot with vba, I have no time now, and I’m not able to follow the new updates to vba with regularity.

KDigest was my try to add a new, never tried before, alternative for MD5SUM and SFV files verification embedded in KDE. Also if it works well to verify them, I never completed the writing code, because I felt no one was interested in it.

TheBoteyes was only a proof-of-concept with a friend of mine, coding a IRC protocol understanding bot in less than 24 hours. I updated it since that time, but I never felt the need to release it.

KJet and ClrLinPro died before I ever released them. The first required me too much study of protocols, as kio slaves wasn’t working for a task such as segment downloading. The second because I never found a good library to access and modify zip files.

Then there’s my ATMOSphere project, which is more articulated than the others, and is from that that I reused libksnmp that I used for my knetload for support SNMP. It started as a high school project, but I’m working on it sometimes.

Now I’m thinking if I should remove some of these projects from my directory and my plans, so that I can use my time in better way.
I still hope that someone comes that wants to help (or better take over) one of these apps.

Has anyone similar experiences to share?

Comments 1
  1. Sometimes you only need the right inspiration at the right moment.My project was dying for about 2 month.. I couldn’t make any innovation, and also any bug fix, ’cause my app was my first kde project, and also my first “big” app, and it wasn’t projected to be really flexible as now i need..But just a week ago i gave a look at the new kontact/konqueror screens from kde 3.4, and i said “why not?”.Reprojecting all, adding kparts, with a khtml part as introducion/device manager, multidevices configuration, and so on…I’m still far away to have a kmobiletools really complete, but now i have a good eye candy, and a complete (and working) device manager.Sometimes you only need to look, and to be able to catch the right idea 🙂

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