Is maintenance and further development of iec104-python ensured?

[andreassteinke-dev]

Is maintenance and further development of iec104-python ensured? The last release is over one year ago. Could one expect further bug fixes and support for python 3.14 for this really great and helpful 60870-project in the future? Is there some kind of roadmap?

[m-unkel]

Hi, thank you for your interest in the project and for raising this question.

As the current maintainer, I want to be transparent about the project's status.

At the moment, there is no funding available for the project. I'm currently working on establishing a sustainable long-term organizational setup, including resolving licensing and intellectual property matters. This is something I care deeply about, and I'm confident that we'll find a good solution. However, it also means that much of the limited time I can currently invest goes into these organizational topics rather than development. Since all of this is done in my spare time, progress is naturally limited.

What does this mean in practice?

• I remain committed to maintaining the project, although active feature development is temporarily paused.
• Bug fixes will continue to be released on an irregular basis. In fact, I'm already planning another bugfix release later this summer.
• Support for newer Python versions (including Python 3.14) could be part of the bugfix as it should work already.

Regarding contributions: I appreciate every pull request. However, at the moment I cannot simply merge external contributions because there is currently no Contributor License Agreement (CLA) in place. Drafting a suitable CLA is itself part of the organizational work, but it has lower priority than establishing the project's long-term legal and organizational foundation.

There is currently no formal roadmap. The current dev-3.x branch reflects the features that are under development, and the open issues provide a good overview of planned improvements and known topics. One larger item I would like to tackle in the future is allowing identical IOAs across different information object types. However, this would require a significant structural redesign, so it is a longer-term goal rather than something planned for the next release.

Once I have concrete news regarding the future organization of the project, I'll publish an update in the repository.

Thank you for your patience and for your continued interest. It's genuinely motivating to see the library being used and appreciated by the community, and I'm committed to maintaining and improving the project for the long term.