Live data from Hacker News

RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

bridgetownrb.com

31–40 of 187 posts

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#31
post #17

Hi, original Jekyll "core team" (if it could be called that) member here - just wanted to say thanks for writing this up, and I had no idea about the current status of the project or that one of the maintainers recently passed away. That all being said: I think it's ok for OSS projects to "pass on" - and hopefully be replaced by better ones! I wish we had a better way of recognizing this for projects or talking about…

Closely related, I wish we had a better way of saying a library or product is now feature-complete. We use recent commit activity as a proxy of viability, but all of that churn could just as easily be an indication of immaturity. It's okay for tools to achieve their objectives and just live on as stable code with maintenance releases as needed. To my mind, Jekyll is feature-complete. The only changes I've needed to m…

I get what you're saying, and for single-purposes libraries or other simple infrastructure, that totally makes sense. But Jekyll lives in a wider world of vital tools from Gatsby to Eleventy to Hugo to (fill in the blank of your favorite SSG), and if it can no longer serve its main audience relative to compelling alternatives, it's not feature-complete, it's obsolete.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#32
post #13

> Open source in 2021 looks like: > Engagement on Twitter > Official Discord chat room Cherry picked from a list with 4 others elements that I agree with, but the first two are terrible. Twitter is getting more and more closed (you can't see some stuff without being logged in now) and for Discord you have to create an account to see the content. Both are not free software. Reading stuff around free software shouldn't…

The Discord chat room is very little different from the (RIP) freenode channel. Sure, you need to create an account, but that's where communities are built nowadays - in closed groups that can be controlled, moderated properly, and automated, while still being a fun and friendly environment to chat in. It does that well. Github is not open. All the things listed there are costly, in one way or another. There's nothin…

You can read Github without creating an account. You can't do that with Discord and it's becoming harder with Twitter. Discourse forums can be read without an account too. I agree that we should be careful of Github too.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#33
post #17

Hi, original Jekyll "core team" (if it could be called that) member here - just wanted to say thanks for writing this up, and I had no idea about the current status of the project or that one of the maintainers recently passed away. That all being said: I think it's ok for OSS projects to "pass on" - and hopefully be replaced by better ones! I wish we had a better way of recognizing this for projects or talking about…

Closely related, I wish we had a better way of saying a library or product is now feature-complete. We use recent commit activity as a proxy of viability, but all of that churn could just as easily be an indication of immaturity. It's okay for tools to achieve their objectives and just live on as stable code with maintenance releases as needed. To my mind, Jekyll is feature-complete. The only changes I've needed to m…

Even if the core project is feature complete and excellent, "death" can come from a lack of continued creation and maintenance of 3rd party integrations or plugins.

Personally I found Jekyll plugins lacking and those that were good seemed pretty old/unmaintained.

However I only moved to Hugo from Jekyll just because I didn't want to deal with Ruby gem installation and dependency management. I am not a Ruby dev by any means, I have enough dependency management misery from being a Python dev.

Hugo installation is just a brew-installed or Go-installed CLI tool I never have to think about dependencies of, thanks to how great the Golang packaging/distribution situation is.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#34
post #13

> Open source in 2021 looks like: > Engagement on Twitter > Official Discord chat room Cherry picked from a list with 4 others elements that I agree with, but the first two are terrible. Twitter is getting more and more closed (you can't see some stuff without being logged in now) and for Discord you have to create an account to see the content. Both are not free software. Reading stuff around free software shouldn't…

Well if you want to reach lots of developers, you have to be where they are, and they're on Twitter and Discord—for better or worse. :shrug:

Sure, but hiding public discussions about your open source project behind a Discord server is a really bad idea. The goal of these things is to also act as a public repository for knowledge, and by using Discord you fail at that part.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#35
I wonder if GitHub will step in and maintain. Isn't it still a built-in part of their pages stack? Even if there isn't new feature development, if it's part of their stack they should step in and maintain it.

You don't want bitrot to introduce vulnerabilities through unmaintained publicly exposed things in your stack.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#36
Pretty sure that open source in 2021 means releasing the code somewhere public under an Open Source license, just like it did in 2011 and 2001. Not sure where all these other requirements come from. I'm already giving you free software, I don't also need to build a community.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#37
post #13

> Open source in 2021 looks like: > Engagement on Twitter > Official Discord chat room Cherry picked from a list with 4 others elements that I agree with, but the first two are terrible. Twitter is getting more and more closed (you can't see some stuff without being logged in now) and for Discord you have to create an account to see the content. Both are not free software. Reading stuff around free software shouldn't…

Don't disagree but tbf he also said:

> Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem.

I think the point is that most projects will engage with the public in at least some of these ways.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#38
post #35

I wonder if GitHub will step in and maintain. Isn't it still a built-in part of their pages stack? Even if there isn't new feature development, if it's part of their stack they should step in and maintain it. You don't want bitrot to introduce vulnerabilities through unmaintained publicly exposed things in your stack.

Right. They (gh) should creative a relief team that handles repositories with very high stars, and no active maintenance.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#40
The thing I love about Jekyll and other SSGs is being able to build my site into a bunch of static files and put every single one of those files on my own server, on IPFS, or even just for offline viewing, so there's no need to leak requests to the Cloudflares/Amazons/Googles of the world.

Meanwhile "the Jamstack" seems to be the exact opposite of that, a privacy nightmare all about gluing together micro-APIs that I have to keep paying for forever. I could wake up one day and find that my """static""" site is suddenly missing all its images because Cloudinary is having an outage or whatever. Why would I want to subject my readers to this, much less myself?

Post reply on HN