Forking Laverna

[daed]

So, wwebfor got back to me. He's done with the project.

He acknowledged that laverna doesn't solve issues with synchronization and multiple devices. He suggested that effort would be better spent focusing on other projects that do already. He also didn't give me access to the repo, so I can't do anything directly with it.

I think his concerns are valid, but I like laverna and I think it's worth trying to make something out of. I'm going to continue with my plan to fork it and develop it independent of the laverna organization.

I've spent the last few weeks trying to familiarize myself with the dev branch and working on minor bugs where I can. It's honestly not in very good shape right now:

• It looks like the project was in the middle of transitioning into more of a client/server model with the addition of the signal server and mongodb. That's not a bad model necessarily for hosting, but it becomes burdensome for standalone end-users who are syncing through dropbox (or not at all).
• The signal server appears to have been put together with a multi-user environment in mind, and there is the start of some useful features (like sharing between users) but that is incomplete, and I believe actually currently inhibits synchronizing across multiple devices.
• In spite of the above, https is not enabled by default.
• The electron-based desktop app version doesn't work.
• gulp is pretty broken in node 10 due to ancient dependencies. Supposedly this is getting fixed someday, though the current plan appears to be to force a newer version of the natives package, which is unsupported. I couldn't find an ETA.