‼️ Future of the SparkleShare project

[hbons]

Hello contributors to and users of SparkleShare!

You probably have noticed the lack of activity on this project and you'd be right. Due to work, personal reasons and other interests, I no longer have the time or motivation to maintain the SparkleShare project.

Currently there are many problems that I don't have the energy for to solve. It's going to take an effort to even get the project back to build at this point because of the platforms shifting, let alone continue cross-platform app development.

On macOS: Visual Studio for Mac (which I've been involved in professionally) has sadly been discontinued.

On Linux the C# bindings for GTK are out of date and there doesn't seem to be much activity in the C# on Linux community anymore. The Mono Project is being replaced by the official dotnet implementation.

I don't have an interest in the Windows platform, which explains why the Windows release has always been lagging behind.

The final release tag will be 3.38.1. Though I will not produce any binaries for it. SparkleShare will remain available for Linux on Flathub and the Releases page will stay up. I will put this repository into public archive mode probably by next year. If someone wants to fork and rebrand the project, you have my blessing.

The notification service that has handling sync notifications between clients will continue running for a little while longer. After that SparkleShare clients will default back to polling mode, which makes syncing slower but it will still work.

I've been playing with the idea to take the project back to its roots, as I still think having an easy way to work with Git repositories is useful. Though this would be under a different project name/focus and smaller in scope. Possible a GNOME Circle-only project. Don't expect anything anytime soon and this is not certain to happen.

I'm grateful for all the contributors that have helped out in many ways and you have taught me a lot. Honestly I didn't think this project would get (relatively) big and used by so many people and organisations. At one point it was even the most starred C# project on GitHub (before Microsoft came along), which is crazy to think about. I poured my soul into it and it has been a great experience. Thank you 🙏

Hylke

(If you have any questions I will try to answer them below.)

[kjyv]

Thank you for all your work you've put into this project! I've been using SparkleShare for over 10 years and still rely on it daily. I've also kept forks of sparkleshare-dashboard and SparkleShare-iOS working with newer tools and added some extensions.
But since C# on macOS seems to be more and more painful to use, I've now spent two evenings putting together a small SparkleShare clone as a native macOS application. It only does the basics for now like adding remote projects or local repos and syncing them with polling but that part works well. If that's interesting for anyone (pull requests of course welcome), find it here: https://github.com/kjyv/SparkleShareMac.

Using Qt could be another way to go forward to stay cross-platform but that was not interesting to me.

[uenz]

Also many thanks from my side for this great software. I forged it a few years ago and tried to bring the windows version back to life in the official repo. Now i merged may changes to the main path of my fork and set up a github build action for windows and mac version. The newest executable versions are available in my fork https://github.com/uenz/SparkleShare under Releases. My goal is to migrate the code to net8.0 for another few years for this great software.

[p3k]

Thanks for SparkleShare. It will remain a beautiful project. And thanks for posting this information. All the best! ✨

[wlaoman]

Thanks for SparkleShare! It was an important part of my workflow up to about five years ago, when thing changed and I couldn’t continue working on my mac. Now i wanted to pick it up again, and saw your post.
So, it made me a bit sad, but life changes (I know from experience) and I wish that the things you will do in the future will give you at least as much joy.
Much love ❤️