Status of work on vimiv

[karlch]

Happy New Year 2023 to everyone! 🎉

I would like to start the year with an update from my side, after more or less dead silence for quite a while. Sorry for this!

Last year was pretty intense for me: I was able to finish my PhD and started a new job, which is much less flexible than university was. Most of my work on vimiv was done during my Bachelor and Master studies, when I still had quite some extra time.

This means I will definitely not be able to spend the time I once had, and do super long coding sessions almost weekly like a few years ago, in the foreseeable future. However, I absolutely love vimiv, and still use it as my only image viewer personally, so I would not want to see it die. Thus, when I find (and make) time, the priorities will be to fix bugs, and to ensure everything runs smoothly on newer Python / Qt versions. New features will of course be considered, and I really have to work on the PR backlog, but keeping everything running at all is priority number one.

[jcjgraf]

Happy new year and great to hear from you after such a long time! Congrats to your PhD 🎉

I deal with images a lot and vimiv is by far the best image viewer I have come across! But not just the software, but also the codebase it great to work with thanks to its level of cleanness and great structure. I would love to continue to contribute to vimiv. However, I do not see the point of doing so, if the code does not get reviewed/merged.

Personally, #467 would be rather important to me, as I do not manage to get the metadata to work with the current mainline due to dependency issues.

Anyways, let me know what your concrete plans are. I am willing to help wherever I can.

[karlch]

This makes perfect sense, and I fully understand and am extremely grateful how you stepped in over the past months and answered the upcoming questions and issues, thank you! ❤️

#467 is definitely really important, I agree, I am not looking forward to the CI havoc that is already showing, and moving py3exiv2 out of mainline would really help with this.

Let's see if we can get a priority list up:

• Fix CI / resolve all dependabot PRs. This will probably involve removing the py3exiv2 tests even before working on 467. --> @karlch
• Include newer python and PyQt5 versions to CI and fix any issues. --> @karlch
• Review / continue work on Move Metadata Support to Pluginspace #467. --> @karlch @jcjgraf
• Review / finalize sorting. --> @karlch @jcjgraf

Any other issues / PRs / features are lower on the list I would say, but should of course ideally be worked on at some point ™️

Would you agree with this in general?

[jcjgraf]

This sounds great. The roadmap makes sense to me.

• Do you already have a rough estimate on how involved it is to update do PyQt6?
• I agree that Setting to set the desired file ordering #387 is also really important. It has come up in a few issues lately. And most work is actually already done.

[karlch]

• Not really, I looked into this when PyQt6 was still really new, and couldn't get this to properly work at all. If the state is still similar, quite some work, nearly impossible to support both at the same time. So this would probably be something for a v2.0 after finally releasing v1.0. In case it is easier to support both, we could of course go for a milder v1.X. Good point, should definitely keep this in mind!
• Sound great 🎉