[qutebrowser-announce] Current qutebrowser roadmap and next crowdfunding

Florian Bruhin me at the-compiler.org
Mon Oct 21 15:32:52 CEST 2019


Hey,

More than half a year ago, I posted a qutebrowser roadmap:
https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/2019-March/000058.html

I thought it's about time for an update on how things are looking at the
moment!

Upcoming crowdfunding
=====================

I finished my Bachelor of Science in September at the University of Applied
Science in Rapperswil: https://www.hsr.ch/en/

Now I'm employed around 16h/week at the same place, mainly helping out with the
operating systems course (in other words: I spend my time staring at LaTeX/C/
Assembler/Python and teaching students).

Like already mentioned in the earlier mail, this means I now have a lot more
time than before for working on open-source projects. I'm in the process of
founding my own one-man company and already have some work lined up - but as
soon as everything is set up, I plan to spend much more time on qutebrowser.
Certainly a lot more than what I've been able to during my studies in the past
years.

However, that means I don't have a lot of recurring income (enough to pay for
rent, food and other bills - but not much more than that). This is why I plan
to start another qutebrowser fundraising very soon. There will be shirts and
stickers available again, as well as some other swag. This time, I'll focus on
recurring donations, but I also plan to offer a way to contribute via one-time
donations instead.

I got accepted into the Beta of GitHub Sponsors[1] - thanks to GitHub's
matching fund[2], all donations (up to a total of $5000) in the first year will
be *doubled*. Thus, GitHub Sponsors is the platform I'll use for recurring
donations. For one-time donations, I'll likely offer various options (Stripe,
PayPal, Bitcoin, SEPA Bank Transfers), but I want to get recurring donations up
and running first.

[1] https://github.com/sponsors
[2] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors#about-the-github-sponsors-matching-fund

Current priorities
==================

As for qutebrowser itself, my current priorities are the following:

Keeping qutebrowser up and running
----------------------------------

All 6 months, a new Qt feature release is published. Other upgrades (like
Python itself) also need attention from time to time.

Testing new Qt versions early means that I can report bugs upstream during the
Alpha/Beta phase, which means they'll likely get fixed before a release. Often,
adjustments to qutebrowser itself are also needed to keep it running smoothly
when distributions upgrade their Qt versions.

In the past few weeks, I spent quite some time dealing with Qt 5.13.1/.2,
Qt 5.14 and Python 3.8:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4928
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5013

A change coming with PyQt 5.14 currently causes trouble with a piece of
qutebrowser (the object registry) which I wanted to remove for a while now. I
started working on that as well recently, but there's more refactoring work
needed to complete the removal:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/640

In 2020, Python 2 will (finally!) be retired, but qutebrowser still uses
asciidoc for its documentation, which is unmaintained and based on Python 2.
I intend to switch to Sphinx instead, which should also make it easier to write
(more) nice documentation for qutebrowser: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/

Getting the pull request backlog down
-------------------------------------

Since I had barely enough time to keep things running smoothly during my
studies, a backlog of contributions accumulated:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pulls

There are various new features, bugfixes, performance improvements and a lot of
other great work to find there.

I find reviewing code to be something that takes more concentrated focus than
writing code, so I can't review PRs all day (I tried!). However, I plan to
spend some time on the PR backlog regularily to get things back to normal
again.

Extension API
-------------

I want to continue work on the extension API in order to get something released
which is generally available and usable:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30

Much of the work on the extension API also ties into the next point - there's a
lot of refactoring needed to get (sometimes quite old) code into a shape where
it is reasonably nice to expose via an extension API.

I'm aware this is taking a lot longer than originally anticipated. However, I'd
like to avoid exposing code where I anticipate major changes/restructurings -
otherwise, every qutebrowser upgrade would break a lot of extensions every
time.

Increasing maintainability
--------------------------

This means reducing technical debt, improving the testsuite (getting it to run
faster and more stable) and introducing mypy / type hints across the codebase.

In the past few weeks, I added type hints to various qutebrowser modules and
got mypy running with the --check-untyped-defs flag. That flag tells mypy to
check the bodies of functions which are not type annotated yet, which uncovered
a few subtle bugs and will make upcoming refactorings a lot easier.

Second look at the config system
--------------------------------

The new configuration system (introduced in the 2017 crowdfunding) works quite
well - especially compared to the old one. However, some design decisions in it
cause various performance issues. I have some ideas how to change those
internals to make things faster and simpler. In the past few months,
contributors (especially @jgkamat) have worked on various performance
improvements, but I believe a bigger impact would be possible by changing how
qutebrowser stores configuration data internally.

tl;dr
-----

- Keeping things running smoothly
- Taking care of open contributions
- Working on the extension API and at the same time refactoring various areas
- Making configuration internals faster and simpler

I'm excited to see what's to come and how the fundraising turns out. Feedback
very welcome!

Florian

-- 
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