Happy New Year - should we stop visiting

A genuine Happy New Year to everyone !

I suspect I am not alone in visiting this forum eagerly watching for news far more often than anything actually happens

So out of curiosity I went to have a look at how long it has actually been and I was quite surprised:

Latest post : Mon Jul 07, 2014 10:24 pm
last Code change: Jul 6, 2014
Last Stable: 13-Jun-2014


CT is a fully functioning bit of kit and continues to be a crucial part of my comic arsenal it just seems the community around it has perished... and thats ok... it is what it is.

So with no malice intended in any way should we just stop visiting and get into the habit of checking a couple of times a year or should we persevere and hopefully get this place alive again?

Long live CT !

Hey anomander,

Thanks for posting!

This last year I didn't have the time or option to work much with ComicTagger due to various "real life" pressures, not the least of which have been some minor health issues which discouraged me from spending non-job-related hours sitting at a computer. While I have ideas, and want to keep doing development on this project, it's not easy to carve out the time.

I am, however, committed to maintaining current functionality with regards to Comic Vine changes (within reason, of course).

I apologize to all for lack of attentiveness on this board. If someone out there with the skills and motivation to help with CT development, please let me know.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for replying with what is a very sane approach.

Hopefully the timing one day will be such that the project can get some new features but to be fair it works really well as it stands and with your commitment to attempt to keep it compatible with CV then for me at least I am happy.

Best of luck with everything and feel better soon

I'm not a true developer but I'll be happy to contribute in any way to this app.
Let me say that if you put the source-code to gitHub (as for ComicStreamer that I already forked in an attempt to improve the web UI) I believe the app will gain a lot of contributions by other skilled developers (and wannabes like me).
As you can see in my other posts I already made a script to organize my comics into folders that saves me a lot of time, reducing the risk for Carpal tunnel syndrome as well and I also fixed the annoying behavior of the scanInfo tag not being properly parsed in some cases.
So please consider my request, I think it's for the best of this great app!

Hi,

For those interested, I've cloned the full svn repository at google code and published it on github, project davide-romanini/comictagger.

Eventually it could be used as a starting point for other contributions.

davide.romanini wrote:Hi,

For those interested, I've cloned the full svn repository at google code and published it on github, project davide-romanini/comictagger.

Eventually it could be used as a starting point for other contributions.

Wow, it's that easy?
Thanks, I'm going to clone it on my desktop and try to improve the auto-tag feature, by now TPBs fail to match for sure.
btw, I'm Italian too! see you there!

The basic process is simple, though I'd like to know what beville think about it. I'm pretty sure I lost tags in the process and a better relocation should also import issues, wiki and releases.

I think it is pretty feasible, but the effort should be taken on the beville github space since it is mainstream (and he's the project leader after all). Perhaps I could do the work on my own and transfer the resulting repo to him after that (transfer is possible).

I'd just like to have some sort of beville's "approval" / suggestions before, otherwise it could be a waste of time...

For those interested I've completed a github migration on https://github.com/davide-romanini/comictagger
I've successfully migrated all the issues, wiki pages and latest release with all history. I probably lost only some wiki comments.

I also wrote directly to comictagger@gmail.com without response so for the moment I'll keep ownership of the new repository. I cannot guarantee any commitment to the project, but for my own personal use I'd like to add some features especially tailored to improve his "brother project" comicstreamer. Help and contributions are welcome.

Bye,
davide.romanini

I can see things happening on this github fork. Where should we talk about it?

In some respects here feels bad but it would be nice to keep this community going at least in short term.

Hi anomander,
if you want to propose something, I think the best place is this forum. If you're talking about bugs/issues you can open a ticket on gitHub, there's the Issues tab for that.
Let's state that at the moment we don't have any kind of approval/blessing from Mr. Beville, so I suggest you to report bugs only if they are related to the changes we're making there.
For the 'original' version please use the forum (I'm pretty sure the code.google isn't watched anymore). I can't speak for Davide, but personally I'm looking here sometimes.

FCanc is right, the github fork was primarily intended to be reassigned to beville after the move from google code. Sadly he didn't replied to my messages, so I'm still the "owner" of the fork :-(
If you're interested, we can create a shared roadmap to get some more work done. My principal concern is to provide better features to enhance the ComicStreamer experience:
- pdf support: I've a lot of original comics in this format, metadata is very well supported using XMP, it should be possibile to embed CR tags in a relatively simple way.
- metadata extension: actually seems noone supports the concepts of "stories inside issues". Disney comics are pretty much always multi story issues so it's a shame it's not supported (comicvine itself has a very bad model for that kind of comics). I've some idea to extend the CR format for this. I'd really like to have a "search story" feature on ComicStreamer in the future.
- automatic tagging from inducks database
- customizable filename parsing

Any help or suggestion is welcome.

Bye,
Davide

In an ideal world the original author of both projects would move all the code to github and then all the changes could be done as PRs. The fork authors could be given full admin rights and we could continue to use here to discuss ideas and bugs.

This is perhaps a few hours work (less) and would stop fork fragmentation which is a win/win for everyone.

Hey folks,

Sorry again for the long absence.  Real life, etc, etc.  I also got back to Davide, but also way late.  (Yikes.)  I think his relocation and work on GitHub is great.  And it looks like Google is shutting down Google Code, so GitHub relocation has become inevitable, regardless.  

I really want to keep these projects alive, but my verve for actually managing them pretty low.  And also,  as it turns out, I am going on a one month sabbatical starting this week.  However, once I return I am willing to make a surge of effort to work with Davide and whomever, to get a stable set of binary package builds of out of the ComicTagger and ComicStreamer repos.

The things I really would like to preserve is Mac and Windows package builds for both projects, and command-line support for ComicTagger across all.  I have found, though,  that often the cross-platform maintenance and testing can be a real pain.  ComicStreamer has a lot of issues that I'd like to address, but currently I don't want to do anything until we can create binary packages for both CT and CS from GitHub.  Hopefully we can get other folks set up to create the packages.

I think the things like PDF support, using the unrar library (rather than the command-line executable) and other changes that Davide started are awesome.

As anomander suggests, once the things are in place, and we can share the load for maintenance, hopefully moving forward will be easier.

On a side note, I've been fiddling around with kivy (http://kivy.org/), a python-based GUI library which can be used to create Android APKs (and, in theory iOS apps), and have the starts of a ComicStreamer-centric streaming-only reader.  In the next few months I can get the source for that on GitHub as well.

Good to hear. I dont think anyone expects or even needs a rip-roaring development schedule. The programs are pretty feature complete already and pretty stable but I think we all agree some sort of group working that encourages proper bug reports and PRs can only be a good thing going forward.

Have you one month sabbatical and relax, you deserve it.

From my point of view there are a few features I would request but apart from that technical minutia I would like to see a step to becoming less dependent on one single provider of meta data. I would also like to see the door opened for community tagging where we can "somehow" share lookup matches to reduce the burden on upstream metadata providers (think crowd working - could be a simple as allowing a means to export/import coverhash,meta_dataproviderid)

Kudos

Glad its moved to GitHub. I have some changes I can get in soon in a pull request (mostly bug fixes).

Hi to all,

Glad to see there's still interest on these projects :-) We hope to better stabilize a shared development workflow in the next months and release new versions.
As a side note, Google is closing Google code and added a nice "Export to github" button... If I had waited a bit...

Some notes about actual code status for comictagger:
- we made some code cleanup change, mostly cosmetic. I also extracted the modules in common with ComicStreamer in its own repo (comicapi)
- pdf support is really draft at this point, it just recognizes them and uses mudraw (of the excellent mupdf project) to export them in jpg. No metadata, no error checks, not really usable at comictagger level, but in comicstreamer it supports the web reader at a basic level.
- unrar support uses always libunrar instead of the command line. I made this change because on my NAS it crashed badly, I don't know if the problem was related to the specific version I used, but the new version is pretty stable, fast and seems cleaner to me. However it introduces some packaging complications but in this moment I'm not concerned too much about that..

For my comicstreamer fork:
- I'm working on a big refactoring of the sqlalchemy code actually sparsed on the server and monitor modules, centralizing it on a new library module.
- that refactoring allowd me to do some experimantation with a full text indexing solution, there's a proof of concept based on whoosh (simple and pure python)
- I've introduced a new search api that supports faceting, it basically merges the comiclist and entity browser functionality, for a better user experience in my opinion. It's far from complete, but the basic building blocks are there
- I've introduced a new html5 user interface (in static/simpleui.html) based on angularjs and bootstrap, using the new search api. It's specially tailored for mobile devices. Still needs much improvements.

Best regards,
Davide Romanini

Sad news. It seems that all the forks are dead as well now.

Interesting that you should post this today of all days, because Davide made several updates and bugfixes to the ComicStreamer fork yesterday (first development since late March, I think). I'm excited to try it out. Personally, I don't really miss ComicTagger development, I find it stable and feature complete enough as it is. ComicStreamer, on the other hand, felt really promising but very much unfinished so I'm glad to see someone picking up the reins.

A happy coincidence.

TBH i didnt expect a reply. It is nice to see people still hanging out here.

I rely on CT, which in itself is reliant on CV.... and it worries me when something in my workflow is no longer developed. Other than that I am the same it works fine for me now but it has so much potential.

I havent played much with ComicStreamer as each time I did it didnt scale which ruled it out. Perhaps its time to try again.

Gone but not forgotten.

Come back Team ComicTagger