Comment by esperent
4 hours ago
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"
That's what we do in closed source corporate code.
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"
"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."
"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."
3 replies →
"Pikaboo maintainer is who last touched it. Patch is wellcome!"