github martinrotter/rssguard 4.8.6

latest releases: devbuild5, devbuild4
2 days ago

Dear users. This is (probably) the last release from 4.x line of RSS Guard.

I had a looong thinking about current state of RSS Guard. You see, when I was starting the whole project, I wanted it to be reliable, relatively fast, stable, simple-to-use but with advanced features, maintainable. Somehow, we got lost in the process. RSS Guard relies on the number of external libraries, mainly Qt ones like QtWebEngine, QtWidgets, QtNetwork, but also SQLite, MariaDB etc.

Every long-standing bug in any of these impacts RSS Guard as well. RSS Guard is obese and too big. It tries to do too many things and arguably does not do some of them too well.

So I made some decisions and started working on new main line of RSS Guard. It will have initial version 5.0.0. Main note for all users of RSS Guard is that all your 4.8.x data will be compatible with it, so if you will want to switch to RSS Guard 5.0.0 when it comes out, you can (you will just need to copy your files over).

Now, let me outline major things that will change (and yes, some of you might be sad, but that is just how it is):

  • complete removal of all web-browsing capabilities
  • complete removal of some major external dependencies like NodeJS
  • removal of AdBlock
  • removal of internal download manager
  • removal of many other smaller things which are not directly related to "feed reader" features

Big chunk of RSS Guard source code is (or will be) removed and that allowed me to make source code base more maintainable. Note that some dropped features will actually be replaced and should be more working than before. I plan to add compiled version of module which would be able to automagically fetch full articles for each feed - this is currently solved by NodeJS-powered addon which is honestly painful to setup.

Also, all builtin skins will be removed and new default skin is being implemented. It will be simpler, visually neutral and should just work.

I already made like 150 commits of work and there are several months at best before the 5.0.0 comes out. You can see that in default "master" branch of RSS Guard source code base. Also, note that I will go through entire list of reported issues and will remove all which request something related to remove code and also all issues which request features which I cannot realistically implement and/or are feasible or whatever. Note that if anyone wants to contribute in any way, pull requests are welcomed for sure.

There are people who regularly contribute and some of them do actually amazing work. Big thanks to them.

https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/commits/master/
https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/milestone/39

Added:

  • Ability to turn off/on font anti-aliasing for the whole app. (#1691)

Fixed:

  • Random QThread-related crashes. (#1654)
  • Article list/viewer behavior when feeds with very long descriptions are selected. (#1755)

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