I've had a simple PR for a Mac issue sitting there for months, pinged dom (author) multiple times, no response. I think the dude has a problem with Araq or something and seems to have left the Nim community completely. Don't quote me on that.
Aside from the above Mac issue I've yet to run into a problem with choosenim though... but it's only a matter of time.
I think choosenim should be merged into Nim's official repository like what a user suggested here: https://github.com/dom96/choosenim/issues/337
A better alternative IMO is compiling from source.
I think the dude has a problem with Araq or something and seems to have left the Nim community completely.That's true, this is what he said on hacker news:
That quote is taken quite out of context, reading the discussion linked it is clear that this comment in particular is about the people of the Nim community who split out and created the Nimskull fork. And please let us keep on topic here and discuss choosenim.
That being said Dominik has left the Nim community, so choosenim is currently in an awkward state without a maintainer. I'd love to see the project continued, preferably of course as an official project, as it is in my opinion the superior way to install and manage Nim.
Again, please don't turn this topic into one about Dominik. We're discussing choosenim here.
We can undo the "mess", for Choosenim it is as simple as forking the project and continuing development, or at least maintenance.
P.S. I'm so jealous that you can freely quote Greek aphorisms untranslated :-)
choosenim is in broken state for me
the shims fails to kill the underlying "real" processes, nimsuggest in particular, and this causes toos like nimlangserver to build up zombie processes and consume massive amount of memory
I very much prefer unzip the nim official binaries into a folder in my PATH
Sorry for my misleading reply.
I'm just trying to explain why choosenim was left unmaintained.
I think the steps to be taken are:
1. Prioritize. What are the most critical problems with choosenim? What features are lacking?
Most problems are known and already filed as issues in choosenim's Github project. Some even have PRs fixing them.
2. Announce. Make a blog post with the list of issues sorted by priority and invite the > community to contribute.
Someone could fork the choosenim repo now, work on open issues and PRs and publish an improved version without any official blessing.
AFAICS, the only thing that would be required to give such a release some degree of blessing and convey trust in it would be the ability to change the script at https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh. I'm not sure who maintains the channel URLs (e.g. https://nim-lang.org/channels/stable), but it seems they are kept up-to-date already.
3. (Optional) Reward. Offer a signed copy of Mastering Nim to the most prolific contributors.
Any reward of that kind would be insufficient to even remotely be adequate to compensate for the effort needed to bring this project back on track. This needs volunteers who are able and willing to invest some of their time without immediate reward. What usually makes people willing to do this are not material rewards but a degree of confidence that their effort will be appreciated and not in vain. I.e. that could be some kind of statement from the Nim maintainers that choosenim is seen as an important part of the Nim ecosystem and that they will work together with a future choosenim maintainer when it is is needed (i.e. to set up well-known URLs on nim-lang.org or work together to ensure always signed binary releases, etc.).