Hello together, While the new year was coming I thought about summarizing what happened the last year in this project. But because I found way to much stuff, now please allow me to summarize the project progress since 2022 when the new team took over.
# Releases, Features & Bugs The first release with the new team involved was 1.3.3 in January 2023. Since then we did seven additional releases, with 1.5.3 in November 2024 as the last.[9] Scrolling through the changelog, most of the entries are related to refactoring code and housekeeping work around the projects infrastructure and documentation. But we also fixed a lot of bugs and improved several other details. - Diagnostic and debug output was improved to support us analyzing bugs. - Continuous improvement of the test suite and usage of linters to force code quality. - Some aspects of the GUI are modified, for example the "Settings" dialog, now renamed to "Manage profiles" dialog. - BIT was adapted to rsyncs new behavior regarding argument protection. - Error handling and logging was improved. - Some bugs around X and Wayland are dealt with. - Migration of Qt from version 5 to 6. - Begin with deprecation of EncFS because of security issues. - The user manual migrated to MkDocs and might be easier to edit for non technical users. - And a lot more ... # Managing Issues, Pull Requests and the overall workflow In the first year (all) ~400 issues where triaged and until now cut into half.[1] All modifications, even those by maintainers, are handled with pull requests (PR).[2] PRs are used to force quality and find errors. In the best days a PR will get reviewed and approved by a second person. But we are seriously lacking reviewers and testers. But we also had several active contributors in different areas, providing bug fixes and new features. To manage on organize issues and PRs, labels and milestones are used. The later is nice to prioritize things. Therefore others can get a good overview of what is coming next. # Facing problems Some PRs are just AI crap. It is not much yet. But it cost some time to identify and deal with it. Every "contributor" throwing unreviewed and untested AI code to our project, is reported to our code hoster. # Translation This is going very well. Moved from Canonical Launchpad to Weblate hosted at Codeberg.org.[3] Weblate is a web frontend, easy to use by non technical users. I did a lot of acquisition in the community, translation forums, and other channels to recruit translators. There where round about 350 translatable strings in the beginning. Because of additional text but also optimization, e.g. break down multi-line text, these are now round about 430 strings. Nearly [10] all strings have screenshots attached to them to give translators more context. # Pulic relation I tried to do public relations for the project in several areas to attract contributors. We got some news articles.[4][5] Wherever it is appropriated I do announce that the project is back alive, and asking for translators and testers. Our traffic statistic at our Microsoft GitHub repo shows constantly round about 100 unique visitors each day. I also tried to attract new contributors and offering mentoring to newbies. I use "Help wanted" and "Good first issue" labels. I updated our documentation for newbies.[6][7] Beside the mailing list, the project now has a Mastodon account[8]. I always tried to establish and keep contact to distro and package maintainers. Regards, Christian [1] -- <https://codeberg.org/buhtz/spielwiese/src/branch/main/bit.md> [2] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md#what-happens-after-you-opened-a-pull-request-PR> [3] -- <https://translate.codeberg.org/engage/backintime/> [4] -- <https://linuxnews.de/back-in-time-is-back/> [5] -- <https://lwn.net/Articles/996720/> [6] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md> [7] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/FAQ.md#how-to-review-a-pull-request> [8] -- <https://fosstodon.org/@backintime> [9] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/releases> [10] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/2028> _______________________________________________ Bit-dev mailing list -- bit-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to bit-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/bit-dev.python.org/ Member address: arch...@mail-archive.com
