PulseView shouldn't be crashing a lot at all, honestly. Were you running the nightly or the 0.4.2 release? The 0.4.2 release is rather outdated, I'm working on making a new release soon to fix that.
Honestly, it's a general FOSS problem in my opinion. sigrok is rather niche and spans a wide skill set across the various sub-projects. We have C code for 8051 for fx2lafw, we have C code for libsigrok, C++ code for PulseView, C and python for libsigrokdecode, and so on. There are plenty of people who drop off patches and move on but finding people who are willing to stay and take ownership of something is a challenge.
Money would only help insofar as it would allow me to buy hardware I could test drivers with. However, I don't have the space for such equipment and even a simple scope costs so much that it would probably eat up a year of donations.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness, though. In the end, all I ask is for contributors to see things from the project's point of view and try to make things as easy as possible. I hope that more people will join our efforts once the project has more visible signs of life again.
Yes, I agree. The FOSS model doesn't seem to be working even though I believe it can. So I still will try to rally people to chip in here and there. I think many devs are happy to work on their projects even without huge tech salaries and many small contributions can add up. So it is a win for everyone (I think I'm a bit surprised -- not really -- that the EA people don't advocate for more FOSS donating).
But I do think this is in part related to the "staying around" issue. No one wants to do the boring stuff and it's easier to just give people a salary and throw that under their umbrella. Hard to justify this in volunteer work.
I do wish we would have a real conversation about this on HN and we could actually dig deep into it. But I think it is easy to think it is not a problem because things appear to be working smoothly, so cracks are easy to ignore and it is easy to not think about if we could be more efficient. I definitely don't know a solution to the problem but I'm sure given some time there's more than enough smart people around here that understand different aspects of the problem that it could be solved.
That said, I do personally appreciate your project, and have recently gotten into some hardware hacking (need to fix some devices...). And I hope you focus more on the encouragement in the thread over the criticism (even though some is valid, constraints matter).
On a completely different note, is there any plans for a full TUI? Or someone that is doing this?
PulseView shouldn't be crashing a lot at all, honestly. Were you running the nightly or the 0.4.2 release? The 0.4.2 release is rather outdated, I'm working on making a new release soon to fix that.
I do appreciate your contribution but I'd also like you to ask for some understanding of the project's struggle as well. Aside from the loss of members due to personal interests shifting, the project has to make sure that all changes do not introduce regressions. We do not possess all the hardware that the drivers support, so when someone wants to change the code that affects multiple devices, we have to be very careful and thorough to make sure that these changes don't make other devices supported by that driver stop working.
Sometimes, when the changes are too big to make a decision by code review alone, we need to rely on user feedback. Unfortunately, this is always a challenge as there aren't a lot of users around who are willing to test changes.
I hope to improve the situation by allowing the CI/CD pipeline to provide binaries for PRs so users don't have to build from source.
Either way, your efforts aren't wasted and I appreciate anyone wanting to help out.
While I acknowledge that the project was without effective leadership over the past 2 years, I'd appreciate if you wouldn't mix up "willingness to merge" with the ability to do so.
There are a lot of pending changes that I simply cannot review or verify easily since I don't have the hardware the driver is written for. Asking for help has never really been met with much enthusiasm, unfortunately.
Either way, I'll get to these as soon as I can and help is definitely welcome.
