revelation-0.5: status and future

[Mikel Olasagasti]

Hi all,

I'm writing this email as the upstream maintainer of revelation.

Long time has passed since 0.4.14 was released in 2013[1] and since
then, I have not been able to keep working in revelation during all
these years. Being revelation a project based in python2 and pygtk
(gtk+-2.0) and not actively developed, it has slowly been removed from
different Linux distributions as EOL reached for those components.
There are also emails in this list that have not been answered by me.
I'm sorry and sad for this entire situation, but luckily things have
changed a bit in the last weeks.

Recently, thanks to the work done by Miquel++[2], revelation has been
ported to python3 and gtk3. This allows revelation to extend its life
and can be included in Linux distributions again.

Fedora has already included it[3], Arch just included it[4] some
minutes ago, Debian is working on it[4][5] thanks to László++ and it
is available as Flatpak[6]. I've also contacted Gentoo ex-maintainers
in case they can/want to re-include it. I understand that Ubuntu was
using Debian's package, so having it first on Debian is a good first
step.

I would say that the current status of revelation is that it works. It
is simple, doesn't have a lot of features, but does what it promises.
Based on the feedback I received in my inbox from different happy
users since 0.5 has been released, this is enough for them to keep
using it.

Does this mean that revelation is complete? Yes and no. As it works
and does what it promises, it may be enough. But there are things that
could be improved, like porting to Gtk.FileChooserNative[8], improve
keyboard shortcuts[9], fix/remove LUKS support[10], move to GTK
interface files, explore new security features (Argon2), or work to
integrate KDBX[11] for example. While I may try to work on them, help
is always welcome.

Thanks all for your support during all these years. Erik is not
involved in the project anymore, but his small project is still alive
in 2020.

Regards,
Mikel

[1] https://github.com/mikelolasagasti/revelation/releases/tag/revelation-0.4.14
[2] https://github.com/mikelolasagasti/revelation/pull/11
[3] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/revelation
[4] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/revelation/
[5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=968477
[6] https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/revelation_0.5.3-1.html
[7] https://flathub.org/apps/details/info.olasagasti.revelation
[8] https://github.com/mikelolasagasti/revelation/issues/27
[9] https://github.com/mikelolasagasti/revelation/issues/39
[10] https://github.com/mikelolasagasti/revelation/issues/43
[11] https://github.com/mikelolasagasti/revelation/issues/14