Sunsetting the Maintaina Horde Fork

A few years back I started a downstream fork of Horde to develop features I needed for foss and customer deployments without upstream dependencies. It went successful, was a great learning opportunity and a good exercise in critiquing our old tool chain and approaches. We had some well-known downstream users and contributors but I’d say it has run its course. It’s time to sunset Maintaina in a controlled way that’s fair towards our user base. As we are nearing a beta and prod release of horde 6 proper mostly built from Maintaina, we want to provide a smooth transition.

Horde 6 (upstream) is focusing on supporting PHP 8.4 without spamming warning&notices while Maintaina was originally targeted at PHP 7.4 through 8.1 – Still supporting anything before 8.2 is not a priority with upstream anymore. I will have to discuss with other maintainers of the fork.

Problems to solve:

  • Archive libraries which haven’t been touched for long
  • Coordinate upstreaming libraries with recent changes and archive them
  • Provide a feasible approach to consume only select maintaina packages and mostly upstream packagist
  • Clarify the future of changes downstream users want to keep but which compete with Horde upstream solutions
  • Invite maintainers of downstream code to maintain some upstream libraries to prevent stalling their own needs

I’ll keep you posted.

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