BrowserFS deprecated

[dr-vortex]

Hi there, I'm the maintainer of BrowserFS. I've been going though the dependents of browserfs.

Please see the notice in the readme: https://github.com/jvilk/browserfs

Would you be interested in updating your project to use the updated fork, ZenFS?

[jcubic]

Is there any information about migrating from jvilk/BrowserFS to the first org? The browser-fs is deprecated ok, but I don't see any information about this org in the original BrowserFS repo. Why this repo was not moved to browser-fs org.

I have no idea what is browser-fs org in the first place. It would be nice if this was explained.

For me, it looks like browser-fs org was a fork, but there is no information about it.

[dr-vortex]

The browser-fs organization is part of the BrowserFS project. It was an official organization for BrowserFS, since I was separating the code into multiple packages. After many members of the community questioned its legitimacy, I made the decision to make it a fork instead.

Why this repo was not moved to browser-fs org.

The reason why BrowserFS was not moved to the browser-fs organization is part of why I decided to make a fork instead of maintaining the original project. John Vilk, the author of BrowserFS, stopped maintaining the project. Since BrowserFS is on his personal account, he is the only one who can transfer the repository.

Since he stopped administering to BrowserFS, the jvilk/BrowserFS repository is locked from an administrative perspective. This also extends to the NPM package. Since it is owned by John Vilk's personal NPM account, I was unable to release any of the changes I made while I was maintaining BrowserFS.

This lack of being able to release the changes is also why browser-fs was created— to be able to publish the changes.

Migrating is relatively simple since all that needs to be changed is the configuration step. You can review the ZenFS readme for how configuration should be done. It should be much more straightforward than the original BrowserFS configuration. Moreover, ZenFS actually implements many of the latest NodeJS FS API features.

[jcubic]

ok, but why there are no information about the fork only some org that is not related to the project. I know that it was the place where browserFS was developed (it seems). But now it's not. It looks like someone added some dead org for no reason. I don't see any history about the org being the place where browserFS was maintained and released.

I can Google browserFS and see some dead org with NOTICE repo of jvilk/BrowserFS without any explanation that there was migration from his project to old org.

Why don't you just remove information about that org at all? So new/old users like me can see there is actually a maintained fork.

Note that I didn't use this project for quite a while. So for me it's not clear that there was some org named browser-fs.

[dr-vortex]

@jcubic,

That makes sense. I've published the notice on the jvilk/BrowserFS readme, and diligently gone through and updated any links on Github to point to the notice in the readme. I apologize for not getting back to you sooner, I went through the entire Github search for "browser-fs", which has over a thousand issues (though most are not relevant).

[jcubic]

Now, it looks much better, thanks. I will check if the library works with isomorphic-git and if there are some problems I will write an issue.

Are there any breaking changes that I should know about?

[dr-vortex]

The way you configure ZenFS has been overhauled. Please refer to the ZenFS Core readme for examples and explanations.

[jcubic]

Also note that browserFS is used by unit tests and it will probably be too much work to remove the dependency. But I will update the docs to include ZenFS if I will be able to make it work.