More maintainers for this project

[clemensg]

Hi Ryan,

it looks like you are very busy. There are several very important pull requests, especially for Rails 4.

Could you please consider adding a "co-maintainer" ?
I am sure there are many experienced rubyists who know the internals of CanCan well and are willing to help out.

Thanks.

Best regards,
Clemens

[ucarion]

I just want to drop by to support this -- it's very frustrating that CanCan doesn't quite work for Rails 4, and if there were activity maintaining this gem I would love to try and help.

[stevenpetryk]

Agreed. CanCan was one of my favorite gems and it's keeping me from upgrading to Rails 4 in several of my apps, so this would be nice.

We all support you @ryanb. Take as much time as you need.

[ricardodovalle]

+1
Agreed, CanCan needs to be updated!

[ghost]

+1
This is critical since CanCan rocks :)

[joffems]

I was recently discussing this with another dev and wonder if there is any interest amongst cancan's contributors in performing a fork and to work as a community to make an updated cancan for Rails 4.

Ryan has committed 4 years to this project, among other things, and clearly needs a break. I think it may be time for some of us to continue with his vision, but give him a break.

Would anyone else be interested in working as a team for a Rails 4+ fork?

@ryanb what are your thoughts on this?

[lephyrius]

👍
Mostly because of the Rails 4 issues. It needs to be solved.
Yeah! and CanCan rocks!

[clemensg]

@joffems Sounds good.

@nashby What's your opinion on this?

[nashby]

@clemensg yeah, it would be awesome. You can try reach @ryanb by email though.

[ghost]

Was anyone able to reach @ryanb?

Also, continuing work the 2.0 branch would be helpful.

[troessner]

I was recently discussing this with another dev and wonder if there is any interest amongst cancan's contributors in performing a fork

Why use a fork and possibly introduce diverging features when we can just do the same thing as contributors @joffems ?

[clemensg]

@carl-pfeiffer Not yet. Yes, that's a good idea but first we should fix 1.x

@troessner Please take a look at the number of open issues and PRs... this is Ryan's project, many people trust him and that's probably why he wants to review every major change. But if he is busy with other projects, a fork might be the best option for us..

[ghost]

@clemensg 1.x does not have to mean no work on 2.x, or else it might never be released.

@troessner I agree with @clemensg, CanCan updates are direly needed and I don't see them. 1.x is working fine for me with Rails 4 but using hacks is nothing I would want to to do in the long run.

[troessner]

@troessner Please take a look at the number of open issues and PRs... this is Ryan's project, many people trust him and that's probably why he wants to review every major change. But if he is busy with other projects, a fork might be the best option for us..

This doesnt make much sense. If he's too busy maintaining it, he shouldn't maintain it. And I mean that in absolutely no way disrespectful.
What exactly would be the point of a de facto unmaintained cancan version here in this repo?
This wouldn't be of any use to anyone.
And I am pretty sure that Ryan, if he reads this, agrees with that.

[troessner]

Also, we are not talking about having somebody else maintain this, but having more contributors that can be trusted to make responsible changes.:=)

[ricardodovalle]

I agree with @carl-pfeiffer, I want to use CanCan with Rails 4 without hacks, maybe a fork with more maintainers it is a better approach because Ryan isn't answering the threads to include contributors at CanCan mainstream.

[AnatoliiD]

dunno why, but he's inactive last 4 months.

[ghost]

"I had originally planned to return to RailsCasts on September 2, however I do not feel ready yet. I don't want to return until I am fully ready to avoid getting burnt out. It is hard to predict exactly when that will be, but in the meantime I have extended all subscriptions automatically by another month (no need to press a button). New subscribers will be charged the initial $9 and then extended as well."

http://railscasts.com/announcements/12

Probably the reason?

[AnatoliiD]

yep)
I think he's working on some big project 👍

[Loremaster]

The problem with fork is that it'll be unknown for a big part of community. I have seen somewhere fork of cancan which should works with rails 4 but nobody supports it for a long time. I vote for granting access to this repo for a well known contributor and developer. Did anyone try to contact @ryanb?

[MattRogish]

👍 missing CanCan working with Rails 4...

[JustinAiken]

I nominate @bryanrite, he's done a fantastic job bringing together a plethora of other fixes/PRs into a single place

[kuraga]

@JustinAiken +1 for @bryanrite's fork.

@ryanb are you reading this?

[bryanrite]

FYI all, I've made my fork into a gem to continue development on CanCan in a pseudo official capacity. Its a drop in replacement (just change the gem name, nothing else should change) and following SemVer, released version 1.7.0

Discussion at: #989
Result: https://github.com/bryanrite/cancancan

Pull requests welcome!

[futhr]

Nice effort @bryanrite but this is a quite popular gem affecting parts of your security, and we have built up great trust in @ryanb so I personally vote for that cancan gets some co-maintainers selected by Ryan himself, think many Github power users are willing to step in if they just get the announcement. But I do understand the eager, who would not like to take over a project with 5.3k stars ;)

[bryanrite]

@futhr I couldn't agree more. My first choice would have absolutely been to get support from Ryan and add more maintainers for this project. Unfortunately, we have been asking for over 6 months now on Github, Twitter, and Railcasts with no reply. Should this change, I'll happily resume my efforts contributing to CanCan.

In the meantime, myself and several others I have talked with are being impacted by lack of released fixes in an official gem. 1.6.10 had some breaking changes in the way nested and shallow authorizations work. There have been several pull requests with fixes, yet they are still not merged in 8 months later, along with several other rather important optimizations. The elephant in the room is also Rails 4 support, which is not supported by any released version of CanCan.

I absolutely respect and admire all the work Ryan has done, but his longtime silence indicates to me that he does not want to get involved at this point, not even to add maintainers. I have no ability or intention of maintaining CanCan by myself, or claiming credit for it.

I hope one day Ryan returns and we can merge the projects back into one, under a CanCan Github organization perhaps, but in the meantime, I want to help direct the community's efforts into a repository we can continue to maintain and evolve.

[futhr]

@bryanrite I do understand your point and think your solution is great the way you define it. Many repositories need guys like you to keep them alive :) Hopefully the jedi will return soon.