Looking for maintainers / contributors / code reviewers...

[isagalaev]

The project was dormant for a while because none of the current nominal maintainers has enough time/motivation to do the job. Hence, the project is looking for a new maintainer (or several).

Involvement

Ideally I would gladly hand the project over completely to a new principal maintainer, provided they're interested in keeping it roughly within the same principles it's been following the past 10 years. It would be a real letdown for existing users if the project suddenly pivoted into something else.

Realistically though, since I am probably still the only person intimately familiar with the core engine, we could probably make it work with shared maintenance. We can work out the details down the road.

My ultimate goal here is to stop being a bottleneck.

Revival plan

Another reason why the project got hard to maintain is that it's outgrown a few old assumption and is in need of reworking to bring it back into maintainable state. Roughly:

• Our build process with several build targets and customizable sets of languages is a pain for both maintainers and users. Since we now live in the world with HTTP/2 and evolved JavaScript packaging it needs to be replaced. I can be instrumental in describing the pain points and historical perspective, but I don't know shit not familiar with modern JS infrastructure.

• It might make sense to severely limit the set of languages supported within the main repository, with others moving outside for community support, hosted somewhere else. For that the API between the library and languages needs to (finally) be stabilized.

Migration

• We should migrate the project under the org https://github.com/highlightjs/, forking it from here. I don't have a good idea what to do with all the open issues on this repo under /isagalaev/. One way could be defaulting on all of them here and asking interested people to reopen them at the new location.

• I own highlightjs.org and happy to keep it running for now, but if we decide on handing over maintenance completely, the domain should probably go to the new maintainer as well.

• There's also a Twitter account @highlightjs which I don't want to care about anymore and a Google group which might be simply deleted due to lack of traffic/purpose.

Anyone?

A few people have already pinged me over email, so please reiterate your intention here, to which degree you're interested in helping out/taking over.

And thank you!

[ddevault]

Hey @isagalaev, glad you're taking this step for the health of the project. I would be happy to volunteer. I do not have time to work on extended development on the project, but I do have time for maintainership - holding the vision in my head and applying to reviewing pull requests, providing feedback on them, and merging and releasing them.

I agree with your driving principles and I will happily use them as a guide for my work here.

Our build process with several build targets and customizable sets of languages is a pain for both maintainers and users. Since we now live in the world with HTTP/2 and evolved JavaScript packaging it needs to be replaced. I can be instrumental in describing the pain points and historical perspective, but I ~~don't know shit~~ not familiar with modern JS infrastructure.

This is a good idea, and shouldn't be terribly difficult.

We should migrate the project under the org https://github.com/highlightjs/, forking it from here. I don't have a good idea what to do with all the open issues on this repo under /isagalaev/. One way could be defaulting on all of them here and asking interested people to reopen them at the new location.

You can move the repo to a new org without making a fork, keeping all of the issues and pull requests. I agree that an org is the right home for highlight.js given the refactoring plans. These repos:

It might make sense to severely limit the set of languages supported within the main repository, with others moving outside for community support, hosted somewhere else. For that the API between the library and languages needs to (finally) be stabilized.

Could live there.

There's also a Twitter account @highlightjs which I don't want to care about anymore and a Google group which might be simply deleted due to lack of traffic/purpose.

FWIW I don't have any interest in maintaining either of these.

[ldct]

Hi @isagalaev, as mentioned over email, I'd be happy to help maintain this. The 2 priorities listed in the revival plan make sense to me and would be what I'd focus on doing.

[duncdrum]

@isagalaev I m in the same boat as SirCmpwn. Moving the repo to highlight.js org here on github shouldn't be a problem. As for trimming rare languages there are already a number of good libraries with such a limited support. "Community support" looks great on paper, but in practice I fear that such an outsourcing of languages will lessen the appeal of highlight.js and create more maintenance hassles than its worth.

[idleberg]

It might make sense to severely limit the set of languages supported within the main repository, with others moving outside for community support, hosted somewhere else.

Making such a limitations will always be subjective choice, so why not make it fully modular and leave the choice to the user? I'd (still) like to see an officially maintained package on npm and single languages could be easily be published as single packages under an organization account (e.g. @hljs.)

Example:

# Install typical web languages
npm i @hljs/core @hljs/html @hljs/css @hljs/js

I've contributed nsis.js several years ago and I'm interested in maintaining it in the future.

[shiya]

I'd really like to help because this is such a good library and I've been using it at several places. I have some time to spare but not sure where to get started.

[sangdth]

I'm not looking to take over, but I would like to help.

[Duncanma]

I'm interested in helping, I'd even be up for handling the twitter account :) (I ran the one for channel9.msdn.com for 5 or 6 years)

[isagalaev]

Just to give you guys a status update: I'm sitting silent simply to collect all the shout outs for now. I think I'll move the repo and flesh out a few tasks this weekend, so stay tuned!

And thanks a lot, everyone!

[tracker1]

I'd be happy to participate in the new org... though not sure how much I would contribute beyond reviewing and merging/publishing pull requests. I don't have enough time to participate in the refactoring for separating languages, though would really like to be.

[PatrickMassot]

Are there any news on this issue? My real question is: how plausible it is that the queue of PR adding new languages will be flushed soonish? Note that I'm not complaining about anything, I only try to get some insight.

[ddevault]

I wonder if the best course of action would be to establish a GitHub org and grant all of the volunteers the rights necessary to execute maintainership duties? There needn't necessarily be a single maintainer - more would make the workload easier to handle.

[isagalaev]

I wonder if the best course of action would be to establish a GitHub org and grant all of the volunteers the rights necessary to execute maintainership duties?

Yes, that's the plan. I haven't yet gotten to it because I wanted to write a minimal maintainer's guide with dos and don'ts accumulated over the years. Without one I am bound to remain a bottleneck, this time as a reviewer.

Please be patient! :-)

[gusbemacbe]

@isagalaev

Hi and good morning, I am sorry for sending many same comments to someboy in the iusses and pull requests because I thoght you passed away, but I want to suggest you, so I talked with one of contributors.

I suggest that you talk with Microsoft maintainers (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode) and its major maintainers are @bpasero, @joaomoreno, @sandy081 and @Tyriar because they use officialy this repository for VSCode for converting Markdown to HTML. Every month Microsoft updates the version of VSCode Insiders, merging hundred or thousands pull requests.

You can find the directory of Highlight.js in the director of an app VSCode. In Linux /usr/share/code/resources/app/extensions/markdown-language-features/node_modules/highlight.js/. In Mac: Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/markdown-language-features/node_modules/highlight.js. As for Windows, I do not know, because I do not use Windows.

[Tyriar]

+@mjbvz

[gusbemacbe]

@Tyriar, has @mjbvz spoken with @isagalaev ?

[mjbvz]

Sorry but this is not something I'm interested in. Our usage in highlight js is quite limited. We only use it in the markdown preview, and use it there mainly because many websites also use it for syntax coloring

[ddevault]

Yes, that's the plan. I haven't yet gotten to it because I wanted to write a minimal maintainer's guide with dos and don'ts accumulated over the years. Without one I am bound to remain a bottleneck, this time as a reviewer.

I feel like we might have figured it out by now

[isagalaev]

True, and sorry for letting everyone down. Let me find some free evening this week (Wednesday most likely) to just move it over and unblock things.

[ddevault]

Thank you!

[isagalaev]

OK, let me try this again…

I moved the project over to the new place https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js and invited @SirCmpwn as a new maintainer (since he prompted me to finally do it, so he's clearly still interested — thank you!). I kindly ask all the others who volunteered (@ldct, @idleberg, @shiya, @sangdth, @DuncanmaMSFT, @tracker1) to shout out if they're still interested, it's been half a year ago after all…

I put a very basic maintainer's guide in place, it'll probably grow to include something about governance. We didn't need it before, but will clearly need from now on.

Finally, I created a ticket for a new build system: #1759. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's essential for the future maintenance of the project, but it's certainly something which only grows in importance with time.

[sangdth]

@isagalaev I'm still interested.

[idleberg]

@isagalaev I'm still interested.

[ddevault]

Thanks @isagalaev! I invited @sangdth and @idleberg as well.

Let me restate my original offer:

I would be happy to volunteer. I do not have time to work on extended development on the project, but I do have time for maintainership - holding the vision in my head and applying to reviewing pull requests, providing feedback on them, and merging and releasing them.

I still don't have time to do extended development on the project, but I'm going to turn my focus towards the huge backlog of pull requests (122!) we have to get through.

[ldct]

@isagalaev I'm still interested

[marcoscaceres]

I’m also available for code review.

[isagalaev]

@marcoscaceres I see someone added you to the org already, welcome aboard :-) Feels really good to have people doing things that would otherwise be blocked on me!

[marcoscaceres]

@isagalaev, could you kindly add @gmmorris to the contributors? Also, could you give "marcosc" the ability publish on npm?

[marcoscaceres]

Hi folks who offered to volunteer. Could I get a show of hands from those of you who are still willing to help here?

[gusbemacbe]

@marcoscaceres, I would like to volunteer, but I can join only in January.

[marcoscaceres]

@gusbemacbe, January is totally ok :)