How's the maintenance outlook for this library?

[efokschaner]

As gathered from the discussion in #929 this library seems to be going through an ownership transfer.

I'm wondering how that's going? How's the progress towards an official 3.0 release? Does @jens-ox foresee themselves being able to steward this project at least until another steward steps up? Are fixes / contributions from the community able to be merged + released?

Or more to the point, would the current stewards recommend new projects use this library?

I don't mean to exert pressure, and I commend everyone that's contributed to the project so far. It just would be helpful to have a clear understanding of the likely state of stewardship, so people can decide whether it makes sense to use this lib.

[jens-ox]

Hi! Yeah, working on MG has been on my ToDo list for a while. The codebase is in quite a good shape, but the docs still need a lot of work. There are also some smaller bugs here and there.

Personally I'm not currently using MG for any projects. I did the rewrite during the first lockdown, as I was on leave and wanted to try out a bigger rewrite for quite some time.

The landscape of visualization libraries is currently quite crowded, and even though most libraries target specific frontend stacks (e.g. visx for React), there are still libraries like Observable Plot, which pretty much fully overlaps MG.

Long story short - I'm currently not fully sure if putting effort into MG is worth it given the alternatives like Observable Plot. If you think I'm wrong there, please let me know. Then I will build a roadmap for MG this weekend ☺️

[efokschaner]

Thanks @jens-ox for the prompt and candid reply.

I personally don't have an informed opinion as to whether this project still satisfies a good niche in this space, so I would not urge you to take on any roadmap work.

Perhaps users with more experience using this and the other libraries you mention might weigh in?

In the meantime I was also considering Observable Plot, and now adding visx to my exploration. If you have even more suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Have a great weekend whatever you end up doing!

[formido]

Personally I think there is a niche for MG. Observable Plot is a lot, whereas this project focuses on just the most common charts, which is usually what you need. Not coincidentally, the chart on the homepage of the marketing site was precisely what I wanted for my project. And maybe because it's focused, the details are slightly nicer. I like the polish and aesthetics of the examples in this project better than Observable Plot. The function parameters were obvious and brain-dead simple. I had zero complaints about the assumptions made when chart was rendered.

Anyway, my 2¢ dropping in off of Google...

[formido]

Nine months ago, Observable Plot was introduced on Hacker News and this comment from the thread I think captures what I love about MG and the niche it fills:

Only, JS doesn't lack this, MG does it perfectly!

Even the Mozilla Metrics team's blog post explaining the design philosophy behind MG I think still really resonates. There's a reason this repo has so many stars. I use these charts for internal reporting and I don't want to have to figure out channels and scales and such when I just need time series or bar charts drawn in the usual way that my users expect.

[jens-ox]

Thanks for the kind words @formido. It took some time due to job changes etc on my side, but I'm back ☺️
Here's my plans for the next weeks:

• I think I still don't have push rights for NPM. @wlach I wrote you a mail some time ago regarding push rights to NPM and the domain. I will publish a beta v3 release as soon as I'm able to.
• Switch the docs over to Next.js, so I can nicely publish MDX docs.
• Add API docs.
• Add tests.
• Add the usual CI/CD stuff for testing and publishing packages on release.

[wlach]

I think I still don't have push rights for NPM. @wlach I wrote you a mail some time ago regarding push rights to NPM and the domain. I will publish a beta v3 release as soon as I'm able to.

Hi @jens-ox, I just checked and you should have rights to push the package (jens-ox is listed as a maintainer on GitHub).

For the domain, can you contact me offline? I think we should be able to figure something out. Send me an email at [email protected] or (preferably) ping me on Element (@wlach:matrix.org).

[jens-ox]

Closing this as maintenance is back ☺️