Offpunk 1.7 : Offpunk and Sourcehut
by Ploum on 2022-11-15
Releasing Offpunk 1.7 today which fixes a handful of crashes and brings some nice features.
UPDATE : releasing 1.7.1 because of a crash in 1.7
1. Autocompletion on your list names with "add", "move" and "list" command. This is really useful if, like me, you are playing with 20 different lists.
2. In Gemini and Gopher, plain text links are added to the list of links of the page. This is really useful with Gopher posts where the culture is to add a bunch of links at the end of the post with a number. After reading a post, simply press "enter" (keep the command empty) to see the list of links in that post, including in Gopher.
3. Added a configurable "search" command which, by default, uses kennedy.gemi.dev.
4. Added a configurable "wikipedia" (or "w") command which, by default, uses vault.transjovian.org. Also added shortcuts for English, French and Spanish: "wen", "wfr" and "wes".
I used those default but I’m open to suggestions to change them if there are better alternatives. Please send me an email to offpunk@ploum.eu or send your suggestion to the devel mailing list.
Wait? Is Offpunk on sourcehut now? What about notabug/tildegit?
Hosting Offpunk is a complicated story.
At first, offpunk started as a simple fork of AV-98 and was thus called "AV98-offline". Like AV-98, it was hosted on tildegit because it was a fork.
Realising that the project started having a life on its own and could never be merged back to AV-98, which was the original intent, I changed its name to Offpunk, thinking it was just marketing after all. I didn’t even change the name on the repository immediately, not even thinking about it. Yes, I’m that bad at marketing.
As I was one day playing in tildegit settings, I saw "AV98-offline" in a field and changed it by "offpunk". I didn’t imagine that this would also change the URL of the page and break any old link to the project. But too late, it was done.
First move.
As Offpunk started to attract attention, several contributors complained that they could not open an account on tildegit, which was reserved for people active in the tilde universe. I was aware of another fork of AV-98 where ew0k was maintaining a few patches. I knew well about it because I forked his fork myself to get those patches into Offpunk. This AV-98-community-edition was hosted on notabug.eu. Notabug.eu was open to anyone. So I moved there.
Second move.
What I learned the hard way was that notabug.eu is doing strange things with git tags and, worst of all, doesn’t have a RSS feed to follow releases, something of uttermost importance for packagers. I consider packagers the most important link between users and developers. I really want their work as easy as possible (and still hoping to see offpunk one day in Debian, BSD and Void). As I was toying with sourcehut, I created an offpunk project there to enable an RSS feed of the releases.
Third move, fourth repository in less than a year.
I still keep notabug as I believe that the interface might be more familiar to lots of users but I’m hoping to use more and more sourcehut for mailing list, to browse the code, to handle tickets/bug reports (no bug reports were created on sourcehut so far, still waiting to test it). Sourcehut will also host the future Offpunk website.
I hope this explanation helps you to understand why offpunk situation is so confusing. I’m sorry for that, it’s all because I was a bit careless on this aspect.
If offpunk makes you curious but you are still a bit confused about what it is or how it works, I would really be happy to hear from you. This software has changed my online life so deeply that I would like to give others the opportunity to do the same. I created an offpunk-users mailing list where we can discuss together, in the open and where I can read your experience and your suggestions.
Conclusion
As I’m more and more tired of "fun" features, gamification, heavy JS interfaces, my love for sourcehut is growing. I’m a bit concerned by the ban of blockchain projects as I like blockchain technologies. I understand Drew’s position on this (most blockchain projects are, in fact, scams disguised as cool open source projects) but I do really appreciate the work Drew is doing, both on the software and business side. I want to support it and I was really happy to see Drew change his mind about not-rejecting HTML email on lists. Not that I really care about the issue but I care about a benevolent dictator for life being able to slightly change his mind on some of his core principles.
Today, I applied for the first time a patch sent to offpunk-devel. A new workflow which, in the long run, is a lot more adapted with working offline. Thanks for the patch, Sotiris Papatheodorou!
Conclusion: offpunk 1.7 is released and has found a new home on sourcehut. I hope that this move was the last for a very long time.
Happy offline browsing!
As a writer and an engineer, I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.
I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!