Our Continuation of MkDocs

45 points by serhack_ 12 days ago | 16 comments

athorax 12 days ago |

Zensical has been a solid replacement for us so far. In general everything "just works" out of the box and is way quicker to build/reload. It is still in fairly early stages, but is actively being worked on https://zensical.org/spark/proposals/zap-005-navigation-auth...

I hope they are able to monetize in a way the keeps the core project open while making it a sustainable venture going forward.

anentropic 11 days ago | |

Yeah I wanted to migrate to it, but I immediately ran into a bunch of stuff that was not possible yet (roadmapped)

So ProperDocs looks promising in terms of being able to just migrate an existing mkdocs project across and have everything still work

Tzk 12 days ago | |

+1 for zensical. If you used (mostly) vanilla „material for mkdocs“, then zensical is a great replacement. I’ve also made the switch on personal projects and zensical works great in its current state.

Ancapistani 12 days ago | |

Yep. I switched over to Zensical shortly after it was released.

drcongo 11 days ago | |

I switched seamlessly to Zensical too. Quite like it so far.

kylebarron 12 days ago |

See recent discussion in [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47482185

pbronez 12 days ago | |

Yeah that’s a better link for the overall situation. Personally I’m betting on Zensical.

jf___ 12 days ago | | |

Good to point out -- Zensical is the project by MkDocs author to supersedes the latter.

slipfold 11 days ago |

This is probably a relevant exploration of the issues: https://fpgmaas.com/blog/collapse-of-mkdocs/

kstrauser 12 days ago |

Two open source dramas in one week? Get the popcorn. From one of the links[0]:

> I do not see him as qualified to keep this project maintainership and if I had the choice, would I remove him.

…where “him” is Tom Christie, aka lovelydinosaur, the original author from what I can tell, and the copyright holder from the license file.

I don’t know what’s going on, but if someone contributing to one of my projects, that I wrote, started a public conversation about how to remove me, my public response might appear as that person disappearing from the project.

Sure, feel free to follow the license and fork the project. Make it clear that it’s a fork, though. It feels misleading to describe it as a continuation of the existing project.

[0] https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/discussions/4088

kw3b 11 days ago | |

I agree here. I've actually never heard the term continuation used to describe a divergent fork. MkDocs might be unmaintained now but it's still licensed, which doesn't change or expire over maintenance issues or lack of activity. (I'm not arguing against the greater good of keeping MkDocs going, it's awesome and I've used it more than once, but a licensee doesn't have rights to "continue" MkDocs - that's up to the copyright holder, the remedy for a user is to fork under the terms of the license).

kstrauser 11 days ago | |

Oops, I noticed too late to edit this, but Christie goes by a different name now. I said "Tom" because that's what the license file says. Sorry, lovelydinosaur! No disrespect intended.

yuppiepuppie 12 days ago |

Did something change? cause this was published back in March.

esafak 12 days ago |

This is a timely discussion for me. I've been dealing with several open source packages that aren't moving nearly as fast I need to get work done. I fork them, creating feature branches to upstream and merge them into a vendored dev branch I can use myself. But when I can push a dozen PRs a day and the maintainers barely merge a few a month, the math does not add up. I bet many AI-powered developers are facing this problem. I tested the waters with some PRs and regretfully came to the conclusion that I have to work on my fork.

Also, this MkDocs maintainer sounds crazy. Nobody is discouraging women from contributing.

aniceperson 11 days ago | |

probably most of your prs shouldn't land on mainline anyway. are they fixes? good. Feature? write a plug-in. Does it not support a plug-in? Well, you made a bad choice since the beginning. mkdocs has no parallization and brings nothing to the table compared to sphinx since its inception.