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I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrot

I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrote your library in creates a bunch of make-work problems that you can solve by switching languages. How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.

fra 2y ago
I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
teddyh 2y 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.
- hinkley 2y ago
  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.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    > Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
    - evanelias 2y ago
      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.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        Fair point. However, officially announcing the end of the project is not too much to ask.

fra 2y ago

I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.

teddyh 2y 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.

hinkley 2y ago
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.
- teddyh 2y ago
  > Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
  - evanelias 2y ago
    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.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      Fair point. However, officially announcing the end of the project is not too much to ask.