How can we help?

[mbabker]

I'm the type of person that would rather come to an OSS repo and do what I can to help out, but to be honest, I don't know how I or anyone else can help out with the Ratchet repos.

At the end of 2020, a release roadmap to a 1.0 release for this repo was published, but there's been no activity here since January. We have a fair number of pull requests submitted this year (across all the repos, not just this one) to help upgrade the internal dependencies, fix bugs in the development branches, and even a potential security fix, all of which have gone unactioned.

The stable 0.4 branch has no CI beyond PHP 7.4, is this an oversight or is something blocking being able to run the test suite against PHP 8.0 or the newly released 8.1?

Symfony 6 is about to release and no effort has been put into adding compatibility with the new version yet, which becomes a blocker for the Symfony bundle and Laravel package building on top of this package from supporting the next major versions of their frameworks (Laravel 9 will use Symfony 6 components). And, it looks like the recently passed RFC to deprecate support for dynamic class properties will cause some required refactorings in this package.

So, now the loaded question. How can we help move things forward across all of the Ratchet repositories?

[cboden]

Hi Michael.

I've been buried under two jobs lately. However, while I believe that's a valid reason for not spending time coding Ratchet, it's not an excuse for not providing a direction on the project. For that, I'm truly sorry.

I'm going to go over several PRs this weekend, prioritizing library and language interoperability; I see a few PRs around PSR-7, Guzzle, and PHP 8.1. I'll do my best to test those for forward and backward compatibility and hopefully tags each of the repos before Monday. If/when I get through all that my next step will be to try and provide a roadmap.

Before I go in depth, where I last left off was wanting to remove magic parameter reference on Connection objects. I started working on this in the container branch. If I remember correctly I ran into a cyclical problem in the WebSocket layer. If anyone wants to take a crack at that, that would be a huge help while I catchup on the backlog of PRs.

[cboden]

I spent all weekend reviewing the state of the repositories and started working towards maintenance and PRs. I didn't get as far as I'd hoped, but progress was made.

The ratchetphp/RFC6455 repository has been cleaned up. There's a couple open PRs I've put together that need approval and Simon/Christian are submitting a PR around testing today or tomorrow. Once all these things are done v0.3.1 can be tagged, which includes PHP8.1 compatibility and modernized guzzle/psr7 which is the underlying work needed to fix Pawl+Ratchet compatibility issues people have been reporting.

Once compatibility has been restored to all repos I'll put together a detailed roadmap for the next couple versions.

[SimonFrings]

@mbabker @cboden I am currently working on testing the project against PHP 8.0, PHP 8.1 and PHP 8.1, so I opened up a ticket to post my progress, see #1003. Will keep you posted 👍

[clue]

How can we help move things forward across all of the Ratchet repositories?

@mbabker Very good question indeed and I agree there are many things to do here. I've just filed #1054 to discuss how we can revive Ratchet and give Ratchet the love it deserves!