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 Wallabako are from 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 Valsorda is
right and one should turn dependabot off.

I did consider porting Wallabako to Readeck for a while, but there’s a
perfectly fine Koreader plugin that I’ve been pretty happy to
use. I was worried it would be slow (because the Wallabag plugin is
slow), but it turns out that Readeck is fast enough that this doesn’t
matter.

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 active 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
articles, and another 5 hours to refresh all the contents.

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 both 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 helped 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!