Future of AParAPI?

[madhephaestus]

@freemo @CoreRasurae @eklavya @Pr0methean @macroing as devs on Apparapi in the past, I'm hoping yall can help here.

I have just recently started to use Aparapi and am blown away by how powerful this tool is!

When i went to look at the state of the project to contribute, I found somewhat of a mess. The website is broken, the "official" repos are down, the source for 3.0.2 is missing, and there seems to be a stall in progress about a year ago.

My Suggestion:

Lets get this project up an running again! I would like to see the development start back up in earnest and am willing to pitch in and do my part. I am an elementary-high school teacher of programming and engineering. Doing this sort of open source community work is me practicing what i preach to my students.

The first order of business would be to revive the GitHub project as a central development and publishing system If we need special CI runners to build and test, then lets do that. There may have been reasons to move to a private gitlab server in the past, but its broken state shows it to be a wholly inadequate solution for a community project.

Next would be to repair the current codebase. The website needs repair and the github pages hosting is more than enough for us. I host https://cadoodlecad.com from pages and it works quite well. The main repo has a broken build in it, the scala plugin (which i though was supposed to be deprecated out) causes the build to fail. Once removed, there are a lot of failing unit tests. Finally, sonnotype has significantly changed how publishing works, so we would need to bring the publishing up to date. Once we have a working build and a publishing pipeline, then we can get development moving again.

I am volunteering to do all of that repair work, assuming i can be added as an admin to the project. If this project is abandoned, I am happy to fork it all over to CommonWealthRobotics and do the work over there. CommonWealthRobotics has become the island of misfit toys where i maintain important,abandoned, java libraries i use to make robots such as RXTXSerial (rebranded nrjavaserial) JCSG and DockFX.

This would be an easier lift if we work together to make it happen!

[CoreRasurae]

Hi @madhephaestus thank you for your messages and concern about the project. I am still an Aparapi developer, but the project moved to CleverThis, Inc (https://cleverthis.com/) umbrella and is now hosted at https://git.cleverlibre.org/aparapi. Unfortunately those repos were not made public by accident and that will be fixed soon and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Meanwhile CleverThis, Inc, decided to rebrand the project from Aparapi to CleverHPC and will be a major revision of Aparapi. We consider it as Aparapi 3.0, but will released as CleverHPC 1.0. This new work is already under way, but will still take time to complete as it will depend on other sub-projects and i have been temporarily allocated to other higher priority projects.

If you wish to volunteer to improve Aparapi, you are always welcome.

@freemo Can surely better detail the project roadmap.