What is the state of the hangoutsbot project?

[csansone]

I have been running a working hangoutsbot for a couple years now, and last time I checked in here there were people talking about and working on V3, to avoid the bundling of an ancient version of hangups.

It looks like nobody is still checking in, pull requests are not getting merged, etc.

I have looked through the issues to see if there was some discussion of abandoning the project, and couldn't find anything.

When I first started looking for a hangouts framework in Python, this was the most mature, robust project I could find. It looks like that is still true even today.

It would be a shame to see the excellent functionality and documentation wither away, especially when it looks like there are still folks out there willing to help write PR's.

I see that there are a ton of forks that exist now. None of them have an issue tracker, so there's not even an easy way to check in with those developers about what they're doing or how invested they might be in the project, so here we are.

I am able to find an hour or two a week to try and help organize things if there's some way to do that, but I have no experience working with the group/organization/ type functions here on Github, so I'm not sure what the best way is to go about trying to orchestrate some kind of a revival here.

[JosephBlock]

@csansone I have a working local copy with most merge requests added, I would need to refork to have a clean copy to make it ready for others to make requests against

[dirtheart]

I have heard several people saying that they are working on projects related to other platforms. Sounds like the eminent demise of hangouts is keeping some from investing further efforts in the project. Personally, the groups my bots service are pretty hooked on hangouts/slack/ and a few TG'rs......with that said....i will keep hangoutsbot running until its broken permanently. I would love to see some renewed interest in the project and potentially some new plugins...but i am NOT a coder by any sense of the word therefore my opinions are strictly given as a USER of the project

[Terrance]

Development has wound down as a lot of the devs have moved away from Hangouts.

As it stands, master is not in a great state, as it relies on an antique version of hangups for its communication to Hangouts, which may have recently broken again. v3 is the "current" version -- there are some blockers hanging around that were preventing it from being made the default (see #761), but it's generally stable and fit for everyday use.

A rough first plan of action would be:

1. Decide what remaining blockers on v3 still need actioning.
2. Merge v3 -> staging -> master.
3. Merge any maintenance/bug-fix PRs that target v3.

[csansone]

What's the feasibility of doing a clean break from 2.x and making a new project under the hangoutsbot organization here on github? Like hangoutsbot/hangoutsbot3?

@JosephBlock seems to have been maintaining a fairly current version on his fork.

Or do we fork it at josephblock... but then how do we let users here know that active development is happening over there?

I apologize for the ignorant questions. I'm not new to development, but very much new to being involved with the collaborative flow of an open source project and unfamiliar with common practices in these kinds of situations.

[JosephBlock]

I updated my fork with some branch cleanup, more to come. I will be dropping v2 in my fork and continue forward with v3 (v3.1 on my fork, marked as default now)

If you wish to make pull requests, use v3.1-staging to make the PR against it.

Hopefully soon, I will add a list of which pending PR were merged.

If we wish to make a new org for maintaining this, it can be moved.

[csansone]

Thanks @JosephBlock

I will get 3.1 running over the weekend and document anything that seems to need attention.

[endofline]

just got pinged on this and I have to admit i've neglected looking into hangoutsbot for a year or so now.

to add to what @OllieTerrance noted previously, it is my intention to merge the hanging V3 PR, specifically #833 into staging, then #761 staging to master. this will obsolete V2 (and any other PRs to master) - this should be done over this coming weekend.

once this is done, i will also review and comment on the remaining PRs

i'm also uncertain how the rest of the community may want to proceed with development, but personally I'm OK on any of the situations outlined above, that is:

• work continues in a separate repo like @JosephBlock
• PRs continue to occur in this repo - but we need some new admins with write access to at least this repo

on the question of forking - theoretically speaking - it doesn't matter where the fork occurs, so long as these repos maintain a common history with v3.0, it's likely that well-formed modular PRs will remain functional across the whole slew of plugins and extensions that have been developed.

@csansone - on the topic of the "clean break" - this would be unnecessary, as we can tag the repo with whatever version number (in effect creating a snapshot of it) and then merge in v3.

[vaindil]

I'm sorry to bring this up again, but any updates?

[Terrance]

Hi folks, long time no merge...

You may have noticed from the recent wave of GitHub issue comments that v3 has been merged to master, and is now the default version. This includes the SlackRTM rewrite _chatbridge.chatbridge_slackrtm, which currently sits alongside the older slackrtm plugin.

I'm currently sifting through issues to clear out old support requests, and problems which have been fixed in v3. I'm intending to manage this repo in maintenance capacity -- that is, to fix any showstopper issues with the current version, but not to introduce much in the way of new features. Documentation is outdated in a few places where it talks about removed or changed v2 features -- any help with updates in the wiki is most welcome.

The hangoutsbot project is, as its name suggests, tightly coupled with Hangouts. Given Google's recent announcements regarding sunsetting Hangouts and migration to Hangouts Chat, it's unclear exactly how long we'll still be here for. Chat has support for bots via its own set of APIs, but is not be accessible via any Hangouts-like protocol, which leaves this bot incompatible without a signifcant rewrite. As such, we're unlikely to attempt support for Chat.