Project dead? #29965
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Supposing the current project owner and maintainers are not just on a summer break, or a death march project, it would have to be decided whether the project can attract enough support to continue with the same aims, either as-is, or in a fork, with new maintainers. The yt-dlp project seems to be attracting most interest nowadays, but does not support Python 2, nor even Python < 3.6, which would seem to be the distinguishing feature between the two projects (there are quite few UI and other enhancements as well). Leading Linux distros that are still in extended support came with Python 2 and 3.5 as an option. I would like to support a Python 2 platform (where the host is a set-top box for which Python 3.6+ may never be built), but it might be possible to do so by cherry-picking and adapting yt-dlp changes. |
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No doubt a fine work, even if the site support is limited compared with yt-dl, but there are good reasons why @rg3's choice of Python for yt-dl was successful and they are still valid. For instance, the platform to which I referred was frozen before Go was created and has trouble with GCC beyond v4.5. Even if there is some Py3 code feature it can usually be compat-ed out to run in older versions. |
didn't knew cli program has UI :D |
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It's difficult to use a program with no UI, even if not a GUI! But the point was to contrast new command-line options, which may just be a different way to set the program's parameters, with internal changes like multi-threaded download. |
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Wish I could sticky this somewhere. The (actively maintained) spiritual successor is yt-dlp |
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The problem with yt-dlp is that it's flagged as a virus by some anti-virus programs. |
One false positive on Virustotal: More in this pinned issue. |
Don't blindly trust security softwares, the link to a pinned issue explains it. |
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I understand. The issue is that I've built a GUI on top of yt-dlp and some users have avoided installing it after their anti-virus flags it as a virus. I'll try making a custom build of pyinstaller and hope that it would minimize the false positives. |
I just emailed him directly, so we'll see if we get a reply or not. |
No, as above, the problem is that it doesn't take account of Python versions <3.6. There may be technical quibbles beyond that, but the project's definition doesn't meet the requirements of some users. |
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Yep, no issues are ever fixed. Pretty ridiculous. |
Which "leading Linux distros" are you talking about?
All of these are 3.6 or newer. And whether they include Python 2 or not is irrelevant if they include Python 3. For embedded devices I have more sympathy, but on a regular x86 machine it should be easy enough to install a newer version of Python using pyenv if you're somehow stuck with an older unsupported distro. Do note that Python 3.6 was released nearly 5 years ago. Python 3.5 has been EOL for 1 year, and Python 2.7 has been EOL for nearly 2 years. While it's true that youtube-dl is a very popular project, it simply becomes a maintenance burden to support EOL versions for which neither upstream nor distributions provide support anymore. (Python 2 is technically still supported by older distros, but it's been long deprecated. In Debian 11 and Ubuntu 21.04 it is not installed by default and only included because certain packages still depend on it. It doesn't even come with pip anymore, which has also dropped support for Python 2.) |
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A good alternative is yt-dlp indeed. But it is very slow to run, which is a handicap for some types of use. |
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I received a reply: Sergey M. Hello, Currently I have no free time to spend on youtube-dl as I'm busy with work, ongoing renovation and other post-relocation stuff. Best, пт, 17 сент. 2021 г. в 03:19, JD Hi. I've used youtube-dl for a long time, and I noticed that updates stopped a few months ago. Is the project dead or are you unable to maintain it? Just curious. Thanks again. |
Is this a real answer? Because he never answered me for my part. Because if the answer is true, it's amazing that only one person decides if the project should evolve, be updated etc. or not. Isn't it supposed to be a community platform? Why not allow several people to take over in these cases? What happens in case of a more serious problem? I find all this very strange. |
Shouldn't he be adding a new maintainer while he's away? |
That's what he emailed me, verbatim. |
Could you ask him to add a new maintainer? |
By all means, Python 2 is deprecated. There is no point at supporting it anymore. |
There is, if your platform only supports Py2. Not everyone is running yt-dl on a stock PC and it may not be practical to change a platform just because Py3.6+ might be a slightly better language (and even if it were, why not just rewrite yt-dl in an even better language ...). yt-dlp has taken the ball and run with it past Py3.6, so there's the place to post changes that need that language version.
Indeed. In the past it has been stated that the lack of competent candidates, or, at least, candidates acceptable to the active maintainer(s), prevented the appointment of additional maintainers. One might also observe that there were more developers in the past but AFAIK none of the top contributors shown by GitHub other than @dstftw and @remitamine contributed to the project since it was restored to GitHub. However it is always open to any person or group who doesn't care for the project's management to fork the project. Presumably anyone who did so would want to provide for succession planning in the organisation of the fork's development. This is not easy, as illustrated by plenty of open-source projects. |
As far as I know, virtually all desktop or laptop systems around support Python 3. I haven't yet heard of a system that supports Python 2 only and not Python 3. Even if your distribution should for some reason not provide Python 3, you can still use the release binaries, a ppa, or build from source...
a) Python 3 provides lots of useful features and libraries that take less code, are more reliable and maintained/supported
No. You can't just rewrite a project as large as youtube-dl in a different language - that would take very long and be of absolutely no benefit to users.
I can understand the hesitancy of dstftw et al. about accepting new mainatiners. Youtube-dl is a very popular project so you need to be careful not to introduce regressions, or in the worst case scenario make malware out of it. |
Not all Python platforms are commodity PCs: a Python implementation might even be flashed into a device. I made the point because I had a specific case in mind, actually one whose UI is provided by a web-server and telnet/ssh, no keyboard or display, but has just enough headroom for Python 2. As a TV set-top box and media player it's an ideal target for yt-dl. As it happens, the security-supported Linux OS where I'm typing does this: Not that there isn't a nest of Py 3 versions as well, but that's the default.
In fact, avoiding the "latest and greatest" features is a good rule for robust software.
My point, really. A version of yt-dl that made extensive use of the latest Python features would have to be rewritten in order to run on a platform that only supports Python2.
It's unfortunate that by some tragedy of the commons the popularity of the project seems to have overloaded all the qualified contributors to the point of withdrawal and yet did not generate candidates considered acceptable to support them. |
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in the end, RIAA got what they wanted. certainly just a coincidence. |
there has been a bundled python3 in macos for quite a while, and it's not even i don't use it myself though, |
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Despite its presence in /usr/bin/, that copy of python3 isn't actually bundled with the OS. It's installed alongside xCode and/or the command line tools. |
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thanks for the correction. i have installed the command line tools so long ago, i considered it part of macos... |
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yt-dlp fork is also problematic to run on Windows XP. There are still many retrofans using this OS. Officially, the latest Python for XP is 3.4, but Russian hackers ran patched 3.7 and yt-dlp in it. Ubuntu LTS has been supported for 10 years, I still use 16.04. But of course it is easy to install newer Python 3 from PPA or to compile myself. I have 3.8 instead of default 3.5 and have no problem switching to fork. All recent events suggest that this is the work of Google and I can even guess the reasons. |
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The original youtube-dl specifically maintained compatibility with Windows XP because it used Python 3.4.4 built into the exe (and VS 2010 compiler). Because the developers were Russian (who love XP)? I don't understand why the new developers had to move to a newer version of python. Updates for updates. |
Is it the one linked here?: And do you know a link to the patched Python 3.7? |
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Python 3.7.1 + yt-dlp for Windows XP http://forum.ru-board.com/topic.cgi?forum=5&topic=49719&start=720#6 Applications used: You may need redist 2015-2019. Warning: never install redist 2015-2019 on XP. This will cause a significant increase in memory consumption in many applications. Also, the latest builds don't work on XP (installed, but then library error). If you install and then uninstall, it's the same thing. Microsoft's uninstaller doesn't remove dll's from c:\windows\system32 when uninstalling. If you want to compile patched Python 3.7.1 for fun, I don't think that's a good idea. Windows users don't like to compile from source (and it's hard, even on Windows 7+). Also, I think for the most part, binary patching and library swapping was used there. It's dirty. That's why binary is mostly common, but you can ask for the source. |
Thanks!
No, I meant building yt-dlp with it. It's XP in a VM b.t.w. |
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Do you mean these dependencies? https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#dependencies Run yt-dlp -v to check. At the moment I have in py version (running on linux): [debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out utf-8, pref UTF-8 |
In Linux I have: In my Windows XP VM the Russian yt-dlp only has The Windows requirements are mentioned in the I didn't succeed in getting Python 3.7 to work in the XP VM... B.t.w., your yt-dlp version is out of date. ;) |
I sometimes even use old original youtube-dl if I need to limit youtube speed (60-70 kilobytes/sec). It still works. |
Sergey M.'s answer seems unclear, can you please send him an email to ask him one question at a time : |
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He wasn't the originator of the project. He needs to share being a maintainer if he isn't going to actually maintain it. This has gone on long enough. |
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Closed by #30568. |
Who is left maintaining still project? Even though there are more than 3,800 issues and almost 1k pull requests there hasn't been any commit for more than 2 months.
Also there has been no feedback on most of the proposed extractors by the community, for which I created an overview a while back. It would be nice to see at least a comment from the maintainers.
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