khmer is unmaintained. what now?

[ctb]

ref discussion in: #1927

hi folks,

I'm afraid we aren't able to maintain khmer at all moving forward - it's basically been in unmaintained mode since 2018 at the latest.

That having been said, I'm happy to talk about how to transition it to new caretakers if people would be motivated.

Additionally or alternatively, there are only a few things khmer does that are even remotely interesting any more. We could investigate how to shift some of the functions over to sourmash, which is a maintained package, or somewhere else.

[ctb]

A fork (for the short term) might make the most sense here. If there's long term interest in maintaining and releasing then we can discuss details of how to turn the project over ;)

[lskatz]

🤯 I didn't realize just how much of khmer might be deprecated in favor of sourmash!

[ctb]

🤯 I didn't realize just how much of khmer might be deprecated in favor of sourmash!

I mean, it's not 1:1 by any means - they have a lot of non-overlapping behavior. But sourmash is faster, lighter-weight, and motivated by many of the same needs :). Happy to chat more, here or (preferably) there.

[ctb]

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1082721#10