I’ve been an ardent fan of Balena-Sound since it’s inception. The last year or so, it looks like the project has been missing out on some love. Starting yesterday, the docs for the project are down (see my post on that here) and there appears to be a backlog of issues.
I’m grateful for everything balena has contributed to the community, and was wondering if it would be ok if I at the very least combed through issue backlog and responded to them, closed out of date ones, and maybe set up a bot to close issues that are a few years old/stale.
I figure I can at least condense to a few root issues, and can try and figure out what I perceive to be persistent problems that re-occur and are frequently posted about on the forum and issues (like Snapcast dropping sound from one or more multi-room clients)
All that said, before I barged in and started trying to do ‘spring cleaning’ I thought I’d touch base with balena folks and make sure this is something you would be comfortable with me trying to help with. What is Balena’s policy for community contributions and/or co-caretaking of their repos?
Hey, I’m going to tag on to this one too. There are a few repos in this org which I still use and are still functioning projects. The org has been archived which has meant all the repos were archived automatically too. It means they are no longer able to accept PRs or issues. It would be great if these could be unarchived, maybe moved to experimental? These two are working projects and still integrated in my own projects, so I would add fixes if they required it:
The rest of the repos in that org I recall as half projects so makes sense that they are archived.
Would be a shame to lose these while they are still working.
Just noticed that a lot of balena blocks in the balena-labs-research were all archived in April of this year. My first impression is that the large amount of blocks / example repos caused the balena team to scale down its maintenance surface in order to save time / cost, which I totally understand. balenaHub feels kinda dead as well, half the blocks on the front page are test blocks.
Would love to get an official update from the balena team. Are apps / blocks going away?
balenaHub is not currently the balena core focus. Apps and Blocks will stay in the long term, but in the short term we will be minimising their visibility as we re-work and improve them for a re-launch.
All the Blocks that have been archived are indeed because we can allow our team to focus on the core. We encourage you or anyone from the community that find them useful and want to fix them to fork and maintain them.
Let me know if we can help you with anything else!