Get new maintainers up-to-speed on Sorcery-rework efforts

[joshbuker]

@brendon @willnet, it would be nice to get you up to speed on the work I did for v1, and see if you'd be able to push it over the finish line. The main hold-back was getting the test suite 1:1, and the JWT/Omniauth plugins fully implemented.

It fixes many long-standing issues, and allows for more flexibility for the community to create and maintain plugins. Biggest downside is that the new loading structure is not the easiest code to understand at first glance. My hope is that it will still be easy to hack/modify with how the plugins work.

[brendon]

Sounds like something interesting to look at. I wonder if this is a good case for trying for a grant from: https://gem.coop/fellowship/

Would you be interested in putting in an application? I'm sure some funding would certainly help move this along, but even if we didn't get it, I'm sure we can still chip away at it.

[joshbuker]

Personally I don't have the time to apply for a grant, and unless I can make open-source my full time job I would rather just let folks sponsor me as they feel inclined rather than take grant money that could go to others in the field.

That said, don't let me stop you if you were thinking of applying for yourself.

[brendon]

Fair enough. I might put something together as this kind of project seems to be in their wheelhouse and funding would mean we could assign some serious time to it.

[brendon]

I've applied to the grant, so I guess we'll wait and see what happens to that in January. In the meantime, were you wanting to perhaps catch up with us to talk through your rewrite? I'm based in NZ and I think @willnet is in Japan?

[joshbuker]

Yes, that would be good if we can find a time that works well with the timezone differences. I'm in Pacific Time (-0800), and can be fairly flexible on timing if we schedule in advance.

[brendon]

Excellent, were you wanting to meet this side of Christmas or look at it in the new year?

[joshbuker]

After the new year would be reasonable

[brendon]

Ok, you pick a day and let's see if that works for us :)

[willnet]

I have reviewed the code in Sorcery/sorcery-rework and now understand its overall structure. I agree with the idea of integrating the submodules and configs that were previously separated into controller and model.

As I mentioned somewhere before, I do not plan to develop directly on Sorcery/sorcery-rework. Instead, I think it is better to improve Sorcery/sorcery step by step, and as a result, gradually move it closer to the form that Sorcery/sorcery-rework is aiming for. The reason is simply that I do not have enough time or motivation to make large changes at once. With small, incremental commits, I can somehow keep going, as I have done so far.

Changing the current Sorcery/sorcery to match the Sorcery/sorcery-rework structure would involve major internal changes, so sufficient test coverage is essential. For that reason, in the near term I would like to focus on reviewing and improving the test cases to ensure we have test coverage that can withstand such changes.

@brendon I appreciate the offer to catch up, but I am very poor at spoken English, so even if we have a meeting on Zoom or similar, I do not think it would be a productive conversation (for reference, this text itself was translated from Japanese to English using ChatGPT). If possible, I would be very happy if you could move the discussion forward with @joshbuker and then summarize the key points in text for me.