chunkwise started as a file in a media delivery service, copied between three projects until keeping the copies in sync became more work than publishing it. The first public version had two functions and no tests worth the name. Most of what has been added since came from bug reports about edge cases nobody thought to write down.
The scope is deliberately narrow. It handles bytes moving through streams and the HTTP headers that describe them. It is not a server, not a file abstraction, and not a transfer client. Requests to add retry logic, caching, or a storage backend have been declined — those belong to whatever sits above this layer.
The public surface is five functions and two error classes, and there are no plans to grow it. A major version is published when observable behaviour changes, even for a fix, since downstream code sometimes depends on the old behaviour. In practice that means one major release since 2025.
Security-relevant fixes are released for the current major and the one before it.
Bug reports are more useful than feature requests. A report that includes the input, the runtime version, and what you expected instead is usually enough to reproduce; without those it rarely is.
Pull requests that add a dependency will not be merged. The zero-dependency property is the main reason people pick this over writing the code themselves, and it is worth more than any single feature.
MIT. Use it commercially, modify it, ship it inside closed software. The only requirement is that the copyright notice travels with the source.