Wallabako retirement and Readeck adoption

1. blog

Today I have made the tough decision of retiring the Wallabako project. I have rolled out a final (and trivial) 1.8.0 release which fixes the uninstall procedure and rolls out a bunch of dependency updates.

Why?

The main reason why I'm retiring Wallabako is that I have completely stopped using it. It's not the first time: for a while, I wasn't reading Wallabag articles on my Kobo anymore. But I had started working on it again about four years ago. Wallabako itself is about to turn 10 years old.

This time, I stopped using Wallabako because there's simply something better out there. I have switched away from Wallabag to Readeck!

And I'm also tired of maintaining "modern" software. Most of the recent commits on Wallabag are renovate-bot. This feels futile and pointless. I guess it must be done at some point, but it also feels we went wrong somewhere there. Maybe Filippo Valsord is right and one should turn dependabot off.

Moving from Wallabag to Readeck

Readeck is pretty fantastic: it's fast, it's lightweight, everything Just Works. All sorts of concerns I had with Wallabag are just gone: questionable authentication, questionable API, weird bugs, mostly gone. I am still looking for multiple tags filtering but I have a much better feeling about Readeck than Wallabag: it's written in Golang and under activ development.

In any case, I don't want to throw shade at the Wallabag folks either. They did solve most of the issues I raised with them and even accepted my pull request. They have helped me collect thousands of articles for a long time! It's just time to move on.

The migration from Wallabag was impressively simple. The importer is well-tuned, fast, and just works. I wrote about the import in this issue, but it took about 20 minutes to import essentially all the articles, and another 5 hours to refresh all the contnts.

There are minor issues with Readeck which I have filed (after asking!):

• add justified view for articles (Android app)
• more metadata in article display (Android app)
• show the number of articles in the label browser
• ignore duplicates (Readeck will happily add duplicates, whereas Wallabag at least tries to deduplicate articles -- but often fails)

But overall I'm happy and impressed with the result.

I'm also a mix of happy and sad at letting go of my first (and only, so far) Golang project. I loved writing in Go: it's a clean language, fast to learn, and a beauty to write parallel code in (at the cost of a rather obscure runtime).

It would have been much harder to write this in Python, but my experience in Golang help me think about how to write more parallel code in Python, which is kind of cool.

The GitLab project will remain publicly accessible, but archived, for the foreseeable future. If you're interested in taking over stewardship for this project, contact me.

Thanks Wallabag folks, it was a great ride!