I’m a fairly new Emacs user and have been reading up extensively on org-mode and org-roam in the past few days. I really like the idea, and I want to try it out.
From what I see, however, the last org-roam release was in 2022, with only sporadic commits after that. (I’ve seen things being merged in a lot more in the past few months-whoever is working on that, thank you!). to that end, should I install from the release on Melpa (which was released sometime in 2022) or install from the github? does the latter have substantive features/bugfixes/etc which aren’t present in the release?
My more broader question: how worried should I be to see org-roam development being fairly stagnant at the moment? I remember reading somewhere that the org-roam creator considers it mostly complete (which is very cool! I like that)-is that true in practice, for people who’re using it? modulo database delays/etc (which someone made a minor mode for recently, from what I can see?) are there any other problems you run into because of org-roam not being updated in a while?
I would use melpa. It is very stable and changes in github are very small in nature. Furthermore, we hope there will new features/changes that will need to be tested.
I’d agree with @dmg: MELPA. (Not MELPA-Stable). MELPA should be identical with GitHub as they are mirrored and the update automatic – I maintain two packages in the ELPA repository and it should work very similarly with MELPA. I suspect the reason why the latest available Org-roam in MELPA is from 2024-07-15 is because the last three commits (1 from 2024-09-17 and two from 2024-07-16) are not changes to the code. They are changes to unit tests or documentation. At least this should be the case if MELPA works like ELPA. Don’t use MELPA-Stable. It requires the source code version to be bumped up – manual change is required in Org-roam source header.
How worried and how complete in practice both depend on how you want to use Org-roam. From my personal perspective, I have zero worries and practically it’s complete. Your mileage may vary.
I’d make one point here. We are using “free software” – it’s built by someone or a few core people, but maintained by the user community. Contrast this with commercial software maintained by the business. For the latter, consumers just wait and see what the business provides. When things do not work in the way we want, we can complain, but cannot change the software to provide solutions to our own problems. For free software, like Org-roam, we are not a consumer only. We also directly change the software and solve our own problems. The Org-roam community has been “quietly active” for the last few years. I forgot exactly when this discourse was created, but I can see that I was already posting in year 2020. There have been ups and downs in terms of number of activities, but there always have been some activities. The free software is not just about the software code. You’d need to look at the user community around it. And the one for Org-roam has not stopped contributing. It’s been always giving and giving back. But as community-maintained software, things may not be fixed quickly. And you’d need to put in some efforts to understand how Emacs, Emacs Lisp and Org-roam work – the more you know, the less frustrations you will feel and more confident you will be about the “future” of your own tool you use. At the end of the day, you are in charge. You own the tool, together with other community folks.
So, what I am saying is this:
If you are a consumer-type, and not a community-member-type of software user, you will struggle to keep using Org-roam, especially when things do not work as you want it to.
If you know Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and Org-roam (or put in efforts to learn them), you are likely able to keep using it in the way you want.
The more you know about Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and Org-roam the less you will be worried about the future of your own tool.
I have been using Org-roam since really the early times (before org-roam was a GitHub organization and was hosted by Jethro’s personal account). I could not code Emacs Lisp, but learned it from reading Org-roam’s code (V1 was easier to read to me) and making my own features. A few years later, now I am comfortable with Emacs Lisp (I am not a professional programmer; I majored in social anthropology and philosophy). I don’t worry about the current status of Org-roam as a project – I think I could even move away from it and do my own thing, but I love the “feel” of it. It suits me well, both for my own writing workflow and tinkering habit.
@Dhruv Welcome and greetings, I concur with the above two opinions already stated – to install from Melpa. I would personally tell you a secret - org-roam is merely a set of configurations that sits on top of org - org gets updates very frequently, org-roam simply adds a sqlite database in place of an otherwise text file that would otherwise store links and connections. There are some more bells and whistles but it merely augments what is already possible with org - albeit in a more quick and refined manner.
In so far, I consider org-roam to be complete. We all have a mental framework wherein we see static with decay but one should not use that analogy here - one should see it as reaching the top of the hill, the end of an procedure that results in a point wherein one reaches pareto-optimality.
Many users have varied demands and wishes - but the secret to org-roam stability is that it was majorly written by one person - someone who is exceptionally well versed and far seeing.
In so far - you must devote your time to learning elisp so that you can configure things as and how you desire exactly. Elisp is an extremely easy language to learn, when lisp first came onto the scene - it was taught to non programmers as their first step in procedural thinking - once you learn the basic grammar and rules of operation, the world is your oyster.
Therefore the rules and procedures of elisp are the conditions-of-possibility which would allow you to manufacture your wishes and desire into what you want, rather than you wishing some programmer implementing some feature,
Best wishes, install vanilla emacs and give yourself 3 months. Youd be set up for life. I would only advice that the more basic you start from the more possibility youd get to learn things, the very first thing I did in my first week was to create my own package manager it taught me about 80% of the basic rules of the game.
Users also have the advantage of being able to access LLM nowadays - the task is therefore doubly easy .
I would only add to the excellent comments one more aspect:
My information is in org-mode. org-roam is infrastructure to make it easier to create, find and navigate. Do not underestimate this. Every org-roam file is an org-file, and all information used by org-roam is inside these files.
We all would like new features. And if you become a long term user of emacs, you will discover that emacs is like a workshop: unique, personal, and customized to your needs from tools that everybody uses.
it taught me about 80% of the basic rules of the game.
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