Comment by teddyh
4 months ago
> How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good?
I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
Okay but… it looks like he made 9 times as many commits as the second most frequent committer and 6 times as many as the top two combined. Who do you suppose he should hand it off to?
This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
> Who do you suppose he should hand it off to?
Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
No, absolutely not. That's precisely how you end up with bad actors inserting malware into FOSS projects they've taken over.
If a maintainer doesn't want to continue a project, and there's no existing contributor who has demonstrated both the qualifications and interest in taking over a project, the responsible thing to do is archive it – not give committer rights to some rando.
In the future, if someone else wants to take a stab at continuing the project, they can fork it. Crucially that moves the project to a different namespace – as it absolutely should, for security reasons.
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