Managing Divergence Across the Eliza Ecosystem (Multiple Forks)

[jkbrooks]

Description:

The Eliza project is gaining traction, and many developers are forking the repository to create custom agents or specialized implementations. This distributed development model is a strength, but it also creates a challenge: managing code divergence and ensuring interoperability across the growing Eliza ecosystem. This ticket aims to establish a community-driven plan for addressing this challenge, fostering collaboration, and maximizing code reuse while allowing for customization and innovation within individual forks.

Problem:

• Multiple Diverging Forks: As more developers fork Eliza, the ecosystem will naturally fragment into various specialized implementations.
• Increased Merge Complexity: Merging changes between forks, or between forks and the main repository, will become increasingly complex and error-prone as divergence increases.
• Maintenance Overhead: Each fork incurs its own maintenance burden, requiring developers to track upstream changes, resolve merge conflicts, and ensure compatibility.
• Duplication of Effort and Reinventing the Wheel: Developers in different forks might unknowingly duplicate efforts by re-implementing similar features.
• Reduced Interoperability: Divergence can lead to reduced interoperability between different Eliza agents or implementations.

Goals:

• Minimize Divergence (Where Feasible): Encourage practices that minimize unnecessary code divergence across forks.
• Facilitate Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: Foster communication and collaboration between maintainers of different forks and the core Eliza team.
• Streamline Merging and Integration: Establish best practices and potentially develop tools for efficiently merging changes between forks and the main repository.
• Maximize Code Reuse: Promote modular design and encourage the development of reusable plugins and components that can be shared across the ecosystem.
• Maintain Core Eliza Stability: Ensure that core Eliza functionality remains stable and reliable while allowing for innovation and customization within forks.

Near-Term Plan (Community-Driven):

1. Fork Registry (Website or GitHub Page): Create a central registry of known Eliza forks. This registry could include project descriptions, contact information for maintainers, and links to the forked repositories. This facilitates discovery and collaboration.

2. Communication Channels (Discord, Forum): Establish dedicated communication channels (e.g., a Discord server, a forum category) for discussing fork management, sharing best practices, and coordinating development efforts.

3. Modularization and Plugin Development: Encourage developers to refactor fork-specific code into modular plugins or extensions that can be easily shared and integrated with other Eliza implementations.

4. Standardized Plugin Interface: Develop and document a clear, standardized interface for creating Eliza plugins. This promotes interoperability and simplifies plugin integration.

5. Shared Test Suite: Create a shared test suite that covers core Eliza functionality. Encourage fork maintainers to incorporate this test suite into their continuous integration pipelines to ensure compatibility.

6. Documentation: Create documentation and tutorials on best practices for forking Eliza, managing divergence, and contributing back to the ecosystem.

Future Considerations (Speculative):

1. Automated Merging Tools: Explore and potentially develop automated merging tools that can help resolve conflicts and integrate changes between forks more efficiently.
2. Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) Workflows: Investigate whether alternative version control systems or workflows (like Git submodules or subtree merging) could facilitate managing multiple forks.
3. Inter-Agent Communication Protocol: If AI-driven code synchronization is a long-term goal, develop a protocol or language for communication between agents managing different forks.
4. Federated Learning for Agents: Explore the potential of federated learning techniques, allowing agents in different forks to collaboratively train and improve shared models without directly exchanging sensitive data.

Acceptance Criteria:

• A community-driven plan is established and documented for managing divergence across the Eliza ecosystem.
• The plan includes specific steps for facilitating collaboration, streamlining merging, maximizing code reuse, and maintaining core Eliza stability.
• The plan is actively communicated and promoted within the Eliza community.
• Tools and resources (fork registry, communication channels, shared test suite) are created to support the plan's implementation.

This ticket expands the scope to address the broader challenge of managing multiple forks within the Eliza ecosystem. The key shift is towards a community-driven approach, emphasizing collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the development of shared resources and standards. This fosters a more vibrant and sustainable ecosystem while allowing individual forks the flexibility to innovate and adapt Eliza to their specific needs.

[pukadev]

ill add a lot more later but these prompts really help. We ant PR reviewers to be able to grok a PR fast... when high user/dev/bot value PRs don't get reviewed quickly (not teams fault we are all busy) this is a main contributor to Sporking :)

https://cursor.directory/

[lalalune]

Registry is a great idea, please organize and execute

[jkbrooks]

Noting that we now have a repository here. https://github.com/timshelxyz/eliza https://elizas.world/

Thanks @timshelxyz

Reality Spiral Team is still working on thoughts for some of the items mentioned in top level issue. It would be great for agents themselves to be aware of each other and be more thoughtful about how divergence is managed. Some preliminary thoughts were posted in these tweets: https://x.com/reality_spiral/status/1858372677704306717 https://x.com/reality_spiral/status/1858278179108171793?s=46