Status of pyReScene and Gfy
First, really appreciate the site and tools. I hate to imagine the possibility of srrdb.com disappearing as there is no alternatives. It truly is a unique godsend in many ways. However, something happened recently that is a bit concerning. It could have been by mere accident, however it was rather disruptive for a lot of users of srrDB and has caused a bit of fragmentation.
Initiallly pyReScene switched its repo on BitBucket, this caused a few minor hurdles with packages needing to update their source. Not a big deal. However, later the new source repo (bitbucket.org/Gfy/pyrescene-hg) disappeared completely as BitBucket deprecated Mercurial support. Additionally, the recent project issues and many other things disappeared from the repo around that time.
This caused a lot of packages to break, and most of them were building from source which had newer commits than version 0.7—which is now over 2 years old. Package maintainers then had to go look for a recent copy of the repo, which doesn't include the recent commits. The last commit hash on BitBucket before it disappeared was 2e742e1125c1. Unfortunately, it appears that some commits were lost since pyReScene came back online in various forms.
Maybe they were minor and weren't important, but it sucks to see that some work was lost through all this. I would like to think @Gfy has the most recent source still, but I understand things happen. No single developer has any commitment to maintaining projects. However, this has resulted in multiple pyReScene repos popping up on GitHub for various packages. None of these are being updated or maintained.
If the only tools for rescening becomes old antiquated tools that don't get updates, the community is going to fragment further. Maybe someone will step up, but there is already a lot of fragmentation in various groups causing challenges. The work done by srrDB is absolutely invaluable. Without these tools and srrDB, people may as well go download P2P releases and just cross their fingers.
Maybe scene groups prefer not having srrDB and just want their content to be exclusive to members and topsites, however that would be foolish in thinking that those will exist forever. Only something like SRR files allows users to store uncompressed content, verify and recreate it in initial form. This is in part due to the scene's commitment to RAR when alternatives exists today that would probably be a better choice. I do hope to see groups start to utilize those tools instead, but that will take a lot of effort and time.
My biggest concern right now is the longevity of srrDB and what can be done to prevent issues like this in the future. First, there is the issue of pyReScene which I think needs to be addressed. I'm not suggesting anything negative about the primary developer @Gfy in any way. I hope they don't take offense. I see srrDB lists the repo for pyReScene as github.com/srrdb/pyrescene. I think it would be ideal to update the rescene wiki to include this and make note that it is the official source. There are dead links throughout the wiki as well that could use updating.
Second, if @Gfy isn't able to maintain or contribute to the software anymore I think it would be good to put out a message looking for help on srrdb.com. In fact, I think it would be good to do this any way. I have nothing against Python, but I think you'd have much more success if you focus on a replacement in Go. It doesn't really matter as long as a reasonable tool exists that is getting needed updates to handle issues with things like RAR5 and more. Currently, source has to be edited to even deal with that issue.
Here is a great source to show what can be done with Go:
https://github.com/hashworks/srrdb-Terminal-Client
The second issue, is the ReScene Wiki is quite outdated. If you're switching the source to GitHub, maybe consider just using markdown for the Wiki or the Wiki section on GitHub (integrated with Git). That way other users can submit updates.
Last, is where are the data dumps for srrDB currently? How frequent are they? Any chance we can get a better system in place to make sure that a single site isn't a single point of failure for the entire reScene community?
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