March 2020 - Developer Update

TL;DR: We're working on it!

Introduction

Last January, I created an issue the following issue:

Publish PRoot / Care Development Status Update #2

I think it would be ideal to create a blog post describing the current state of PRoot i.e. the transition of maintainership from the original author, and the issues faced by the current maintainers leading to the large gap since the last release.

Unfortunately, that never happened...

Let's face it, everyone is busy. I get it. But it's hard for potential new contributors to get on board with our project if it looks dead!

So let's just do it. Here we go.

Maintainership Transition

PRoot was originally developed by Cedric Vincent at STMicroelectronics, (See: AUTHORS). He was involved up until the release of v5.1.0 on December 18, 2014. After that, his involvment continually decreased and eventually stopped.

A few years later (November 3, 2016), a group of developers stepped up to maintain the project, (See: https://github.com/proot-me/proot/issues/106).

Unfortunately, none of these developers are still active, (See: Removing Inactive Members).

Recent Improvements

In the last year or so we have made the following improvements:

• Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Best Practices
• GitLab CI/CD Pipelines for builds
• Google Summer of Code (rejected)
• Package for Alpine Linux
• Package for Void Linux
• Python Extension
• Rename loader binaries
• StackOverflow Advertisement

Current Status

We still have lots of work to do. Most importantly, we need to fix the seccomp bug, and also we need to overhaul the testsuite. I am glad to see various contributors submitting patches and creating issues, and I look forward to working together with everyone to maintain this project.