compare with other fork

[micahstubbs]

Some of the contributors from the almende/vis have started a new fork, https://github.com/visjs/vis-network.

This issue aims to create a minimal diff between this project at 3a5d255 and their project at visjs/vis-network@7c75878

With this diff in hand, we can hopefully have an informed conversation about how to react to their recent improvements.

Some nice improvements that they have added recently:

• use rollup as a bundler [commit]
• generate .esm bundles [same commit]
• TypeScript support [commit]

Right now they only have two people contributing, but it is possible that they may pick up momentum in the future. Their project model does seem somewhat different than ours:

• Theirs: few contributors, backed by crowdfunding
• Ours: many contributors, backed by open-source goodwill

We could plausibly:

1. incorporate their improvements here
2. acknowledge their improvements, and add a redirect to their project here
3. wait and see if:
   • their improvements continue
   • their project model is sustainable

[micahstubbs]

to create the diff, I followed the process in this stackoverflow answer https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24787403/how-do-i-compare-repos-from-different-projects-through-github

[micahstubbs]

this produces a 21 megabyte (!!) .diff file

la *.diff
-rw-r--r--  1   21M Aug  1 21:31 diff-visjs-network.diff

[micahstubbs]

right now, I'm parsing this big diff file, to get down to a smaller, more meaningful diff. My general process is to: notice and remove the body of the change from the diff:

• folder changes. examples of this so far are the examples/ directory
• library files like bootstrap
• new esm modules from their fork

[micahstubbs]

along the way, I learned how to select a large block of text in Sublime Text. fun times! https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/large-selection-highlight-or-select-range-by-line-number/13879

You might be looking for the “Mark” feature.

Ctrl-G to go to the last line you want to select, by number.
Edit > Mark > Set Mark to set your selection-end marker.
Ctrl-G (or Ctrl-Home) to go to the first line you want to select.
Edit > Mark > Select to Mark

[mojoaxel]

We consider visjs not just a fork, but the "official" (backed by almende and year-long maintainers) successor of the almende/vis repository.

We would have been VERY happy to just invite your visjs-network to the visjs family(!), but we noticed that you made a big error in judgment by just copying the code and not forking it. This way you through away the complete git history and with it the full attribution history. Later you did the same think by just copying existing vis-pull-request (probably line by line) into you project instead of git cherry-picking the original community from the original contributors, like we did.

While you approach is legally sound it is morally and technical wrong in my eyes!
It makes me very sad to see a open-source person acting this way. Sadly this makes it impossible for me to support this repository 😢

Yours

• scrump together code from different sources
• no attribution to the 100+ original contributors
• a one-person "community"
• only network chart (visjs is much more than the network)
• no proper releases

Ours

• different elaborately created forks with proper git history
• adopting of vis pull-requests with full git-history attribution.
• some long-term contributors
• backed by almende and www.visjs.org
• proper releases

@micahstubbs You already made some useful contributions to vis and I will take the change to invite you very warmly to join us as a maintainer of the vis-network module. There you can work in a team, get (and give) reviews on pull-request and work on "the official" library 😉

Everybody that has contributed and shown team spirit will become a maintainer very fast in our community. As i see it, right at this moment we are basically feature-identical. It would be the perfect moment start working together!

Having a visjs-community with just one person next to the visjs community is probably very confusing to a lot of people! 😕

We invite everybody to join us in keeping the vis project alive by contributing to a library of their choice and becoming a community member or even a repository-maintainer. 🚀

[micahstubbs]

for others reading, my motivation for this fork back in 2018 was to have a place where PRs for the network module of visjs could be reviewed quickly.

If @mojoaxel's fork has a team of maintainers that are able to review PRs quickly, then I think this project has served it's purpose, by providing a home for the visjs community until the old maintainers became active again. Happy to see them succeed.

If not, then I imagine that there is still a place for a community run, alternative home for the visjs-network project 😄

[micahstubbs]

oh! and I still need to share that diff. I got distracted looking through it last time.

[mojoaxel]

oh! and I still need to share that diff

Maybe a diff only of the lib folder could be useful. I'm not sure, though.