AngularJS material - Dead project, what can we do?

[flo...@spectrm.de]

Hello,

we still using angularJS together with angular material. 

I followed the github repo for material for months now and I came to the conclusion that this repo is no longer supported. Since angularJS and angular material are strong binded for me I try my luck in this google group. 

The repo has no changes for 19 days now. Merge requests are not merged for months and issues are increasing day for day with no answer at all. 

From the community side I would wish to have more information (by google?) and find maybe responsible persons to discuss the next steps of the project.

There are some people who would like to fix things but if I see that it doesn't matter if you invest time because you dont get answers anyway it is demotivating in doing anything to improve the project.

Does anybody know persons I can contact for angular material (1) ?

My target is to get in contact with persons and find a way to continue/stabilize angularJS material and bring it to a stable end. And maybe how the community can take part in this process.

Best from Berlin,

Florian

[Sander Elias]

Hi Florian,

I brought the issue to the attention of the (I hope) relevant persons. Now all I can do is await the result of that. I hope things will clear up soon.

With kind regards

Sander

[flo...@spectrm.de]

Thank you :)  

I hope it got clear that I don't want to piss off or attack persons! 

I just want to get some attention of persons who are in charge of the project to find a way to reactivate this project. Or maybe the outcome is to abandon the project at all, but even this would be an information to work with.

All the best,

Florian

[Sander Elias]

Hi Florian,

Well, me neither. But with my tact and finesse, that will never happen 😇😃

Regards

Sander

[Sander Elias]

Hi Florian,

I know the Material team itself would love to back to the bi-monthly pace the had before, and move the project forward again. 

I still think MD1 is a great project. But somehow there is an issue somewhere up the tree. It is about time to shake it up a bit.

Regards

Sander

[Michael Prentice]

There is some discussion about this from May over on the AngularJS Material forums here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ngmaterial/hD0hwv7zI0s

Michael Prentice

DevIntent

GDG Space Coast

[Michael Prentice]

It looks like the 1.1.6 milestones are being tagged efficiently, but the merges haven’t started happening for that milestone (https://github.com/angular/material/milestone/58) yet. But that’s not totally surprising with 11/9 being the target date for 1.1.6.

1.1.5 was released just 20 days ago and it was a release of some pretty significant size (https://github.com/angular/material/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#115-2017-09-06) after the almost 5 months since 1.1.4 was released in April.

If you want to discuss things with the core team and offer some community support, you should try the forums here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ngmaterial

Quite a few individuals and companies have found a path to contributing to the project on the forums. It's a great place to help people and even to offer your services as a contributor to the project.

Michael Prentice

DevIntent

GDG Space Coast

[flo...@spectrm.de]

Shortly before 1.1.5 was released the not resolved but tagged pull requests got the tag 1.1.6 (from 1.1.5). This is ok, but it is not 'cool' that pull requests (for bugfixes) are being marked as ready since months and not merged yet.

For me it seems there is a huge lack in communication. In my opinion the team does not need to code anymore except for critical things. But I would like to see some persons responsible for managing the pull-requests and issues actively. So the community would maybe deliver more pull-requests for bug-fixing and the angularJS material group members can concentrate in code review etc...

And the linked forum I visit daily. It's dead as well ;) Whenever there is an (rare) answer in the last months it was from a none AM-member. And the discussions about "I it still supported" are rising.

All the best,
Florian

[Sander Elias]

Hi Florian,

I got some early feedback, and it's positive.  Here is what I got, and I will paste it in verbatim:

This is just a medium-term temporary delay, maintenance and PR merging will resume soon.

That is it. I asked for a tad more, and expect to get some more feedback 'soon'. I'll keep you posted. At least now you know, as much as ido ;)

Regards

Sander

[Michael Prentice]

As far as I understand it, AngularJS Material is used widely within Google and whenever a breaking change occurs in the repository, it also breaks Google apps and stops Google developers from being able to work. This gets highlighted very prominently and causes virtual alarms to go off.

Thus, as far as I understand it, there is a "Google pre-submit" process that is in place to verify that PRs pass all of the internal Google tests before they can be merged. Of course from an OSS project perspective, this represents a black box and an unknown since it's impossible to run those tests and verify that your fix is OK outside of Google. Unfortunately when these tests break, it's not usually the contributor who has to fix them, instead it's usually an AM core member who has to resolve the issues with the internal tests and/or PR.

As this "Google pre-submit" process is also not 100% clear to me, I can't tell you if there is some way to streamline it or not. It would be nice to hear more about that from the core team.

That said, unfortunately the current process also seems to prohibit the opening up of the OSS project to a wide range of contributors (i.e. to allow more people to perform merges of PRs). It would be nice to hear from the core team if there are any immediate or long term plans to change this?

Thank you for starting this discussion. I agree that healthy OSS projects are responsive to open issues and PRs, especially from first time contributors. I'm glad to see that there continues to be demand for improvements and bug fixes to AngularJS Material.

Michael Prentice

DevIntent

GDG Space Coast

[flo...@spectrm.de]

Heyho,

so, did you get soonish feedback already? I mean... it is completely dead atm :D 

https://github.com/angular/material/graphs/contributors?from=2017-04-19&to=2017-10-18&type=c

Best,

Florian

[Sander Elias]

Hi Florian,

Yes I did, the wheel is turning. I can't really go into details yet, but I'll keep on pushing this. I'm fairly confident that the project will resume within a reasonable time-frame, but for now the ball is on Google's side.

Regards

Sander