PodBrowser (PB) was developed as a reference implementation of how to view and manage data in your Pod. As Solid continues to evolve and we work to streamline the user and developer experience, our plan is to move the PodBrowser experience to a new platform. As part of that plan, we are deprecating the legacy PodBrowser on February 27th, 2023. This will include disabling cloning of the repository and accepting contributions in order to highlight that PodBrowser is no longer a recommended reference implementation.
For demonstration purposes, PodBrowser will continue to be hosted at https://podbrowser.inrupt.com/ until its replacement is released later this year. At that time PodBrowser will officially reach its end of life. For now, you can continue to use PodBrowser to browse your Pod.
We understand changes like this may cause some inconvenience, but they are necessary to provide a more secure and reliable Web.
I understand Inrupt wanting to drop this in favour of something else, but I have to say I don’t understand the rationale to remove the repository and keep people from cloning it.
Why not just archive it? And let anyone who wants to keep working on this do it in their own fork.
It is a shame they didn’t keep it about, as there was some important logic in there that fixed a bug in solid-ui-react, which really needed to be fixed in one of the lower level SDKs.
I can try and provide some insight into the rational to close the repo.
PodBrowser provides an essential element of security that determines who is allowed to access certain data and in what circumstances. While useful in past, deprecation means the code is no longer being updated or patched in a manner that would make it safe to leave open or fork into other uses. Deprecation thus means closed. It is being replaced by a suitable and safer maintained alternative. We’ll be releasing updates on the open source alternative in the very near future. PodBrowser will continue to be hosted at https://podbrowser.inrupt.com until the alternative is available.