Release with latest Angular support

[Heatmanofurioso]

Hi @HaithemMosbahi. Any possible ETA on the release of the latest changes?
If there is any issue, or anything I can help with towards it, I'd gladly take up any issue

[odahcam]

Sorry, no ETA, Haithem is the only one who can release packages this moment.

[Heatmanofurioso]

He seemed to stop being active a while after a year ago.

I hate to say this, but should we maybe consider forking and continuing the package ourselves? I've sent him an email around a month ago asking about the dependency updates before I decided to do them myself, but he didn't answer.

And I think that, with the due reference, we should consider continuing the project ourselves @odahcam

[odahcam]

Yeah, this is a recorrent question now. I won't be an active contributor as well, but I can in fact help maintain. @PowerKiKi is a good contributor and his opinion matters in that question.

[PowerKiKi]

@Heatmanofurioso, we've been on the verge of forking a few months ago, but have been saved in extremis. But since then, the whole thing died down again. So I recently made up my mind to migrating away from this lib. My opinion on things didn't change since then.

[Heatmanofurioso]

I don't see myself having much time to be a main contributor, but I could easily also take part in helping maintain the library.

I think the library has some decent potential to be kept alive, and the biggest issue in forking it would probably be bringing attention to the forked version. "That, and I'd like to avoid it as much as possible, since I am a strong supporter of not trying to take ownership of something I shouldn't. But HaithemMosbahi seems to have gone inactive, and I think it's what we should do".

@odahcam Would you like to take ownership of it then? Or should I if no one else volunteers?

EDIT: I've tried contacting HaithemMosbahi one last time also, to see if he might share ownership of the repo, but if he doesn't, I feel that the opensource spirit would be for us to either drop it, or work on it

[odahcam]

I would take ownership if needed, no problem. But I would just maintain the repsitory and probably wouldn't implement many things.

[Heatmanofurioso]

Sounds great @odahcam!
Anyway, I was able to reach HaithemMosbahi through other means "I believe I wasn't too invasive/bothersome". He said he'll try and get some time to help us out with this issue, so let's wait for a reply on his side once he has time for it :)

[PowerKiKi]

If you can get a hold of HaithemMosbahi, I strongly suggest you ask for total control on this repository and the related npm registry (for one or both of you guys), or else fork the whole project. Anything else would be a waste of time for both parties.

[mhosman]

Yeah, we need someone else to keep updating this repo & publish new versions. @HaithemMosbahi can you please give access to other people to improve this library? That would be great! Thanks!

[rwdroge]

fingers crossed...

[Heatmanofurioso]

Well. Apparently the owner hasn't had time to reach out to us and help us out with this after that initial talk.
Do you guys think it's worth trying to reach out to him again, or should we fork this with the correct reference?

As I said.. I'm not much in favour of "taking someone's work", but in the open-source spirit, I would like to maintain this project, and also to keep on using it
@odahcam @mhosman @PowerKiKi

[PowerKiKi]

Fork right now, with the appropriate attribution, and be done with it. The MIT license allows you do pretty much anything you want. And it's been months that several people tried to establish a working collaboration, but it never happened, because the owner did not share enough accesses. Fork, rename, make a respectful announcement around here, and move the community to something that is maintained (collaboratively).

[mhosman]

We can create a package ngx-avatars (plural) and that's it.

[Heatmanofurioso]

Anyone opposes on me making a fork on that namespace and attempting to make the package on npm?
Or anyone else wishes to take it? Also, although we do want to make reference to the old package, and give the appropriate attribution, I believe we should give it a different name, as it might be confusing to people the similarity between both, and people might mistakenly use the wrong package

[Heatmanofurioso]

Also... any suggestions for the name? 😆

[mhosman]

Just put ngx-avatars and let's give access to at least two contributors to the package (I'm saying, just to speed up things). If you need help please let me know.

[Heatmanofurioso]

The repo has been created at https://github.com/Heatmanofurioso/ngx-avatars
Please give a look on the PR guys

EDIT:
Please give a look at this discussion.
Heatmanofurioso/ngx-avatars#4

[Heatmanofurioso]

In case anyone is interested, the package is published and working at ngx-avatars

[mhosman]

Maybe we could put a note in the README in this repo, telling that is deprecated and the project will continue as ngx-avatars.

[Heatmanofurioso]

@odahcam If you agree, could you see to it?

[HaithemMosbahi]

Hello guys,

Sorry for not being active for a long period.

I just published a new version with the changes that you merged over the last months.

Who would be interested in being added to the npm package maintainers list, that way I don't block the release of new versions when I am not available.

[Heatmanofurioso]

Hi Haithem.
I'd like to be added.
If we feel like we can maintain this project, I'd much rather do that than have a clone.

I'll gladly deprecate that child project if we can keep this one up :)

[HaithemMosbahi]

Great!
Could you share with me your npm user name ? I will send you an invite

Thank you for your help

[mhosman]

@PowerKiKi Can you please also share your npm user? It could be great to have at least 2 users in addition to @HaithemMosbahi

[PowerKiKi]

I am https://www.npmjs.com/~powerkiki. You should definitely add https://www.npmjs.com/~odahcam who has been helping here even longer than me, and https://www.npmjs.com/~heatmanofurioso who owns the new fork.

[HaithemMosbahi]

Sounds good! I will add you as maintainers.
Thanks a lot for your help and contributions

[HaithemMosbahi]

@PowerKiKi @odahcam @Heatmanofurioso I just added you as maintainers to the npm package. You should have received an invite by now.

[PowerKiKi]

I can confirm I have access, though somehow it is not visible publicly, probably some stale cache:

[Heatmanofurioso]

Same here. Although I'm not sure if you show up as a collaborator only once you effectively collaborate "do a publish".
But that doesn't matter.

Thank you for your time and attention @HaithemMosbahi

I'm gonna do a PR taking Angular 11.2.x in consideration here "once I have time", and once we can support the latest version, I'm going to deprecate my forked project, and point it back here

[odahcam]

@HaithemMosbahi is there a way you can give us permissions to change the secrets of this repository? That would allow us to configure GitHub Actions to test and auto-release the master branch!

---

Edit: I forgot to thank you @HaithemMosbahi for giving us that privilege, thanks!

[PowerKiKi]

I recommend creating a GitHub org, transfer ownership of this repository to that org, and then increase access privilege (to admin) for some of us.

[Heatmanofurioso]

This convo seems to be addressed on #125
Therefore, I'm closing this issue so we can approach the whole discussion there