Open Source Maintainer Experiences

As the maintainer of ripgrep, I'd like to respectfully ask you not to harass other maintainers of open source projects about how they spend their free time. I've been where ggreer is and it's not pleasant. I completely understand their position, and a little empathy on your part would go a long way. In an ideal world, the maintenance status of a project would be mentioned in the project README, but speaking from personal experience, this is seemingly difficult to do in practice.

Amazing write up! Something I would add as open source maintainer:* Feedback is needed. After years I built up a filter to annoying users, and I would simply ignore their feedback, but +1 and mentioning the feature would be useful is invaluable (and why you cannot use workarounds). Please do that in a nice, productive way (:* It might be that the feature you and others are asking for was in paid version of the project, thus maintainers actively ignored it. Not the healthiest thing to do, b

My worst experience is to submit two decent PR that was ignored by maintainers. I had burden to support them for a month, solving merge conflicts, solving new bugs in the main branch that were merged without testing, and to adapt test system to prove my changes are solving something.And then I saw that maintainer not just ignores but closes every else PR with these words:> your contributions are too undisciplined and difficult to review. please just make sure there are issues filed for

The maintainer does not owe anyone attention. Strangers demanding attention is sometimes a reason maintainers burnout and abandon projects.If it really matters, fork the project and take responsibility for moving it in the direction you think it should go and run it the way you think it ought to be run.Good luck.

I'd encourage independent open source maintainers to remind themselves that they don't owe anyone anything. If someone asks for something, it's perfectly reasonable to tell them "Sorry, I don't plan to work on this" and "PRs welcome" -- or even "sorry, I'm not accepting PRs, feel free to fork". If they get indignant about it, just ban them. You don't have to feel bad. You write your code for you, if others find it useful, great, if they

Because those maintainers' time is free?

The key suggestion:"bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their

The maintainer didn't answer the question. But I don't think it was snarky. If you want a problem solved in an open source project you (and your financially very solvent customers) rely on the minimum would be to offer some way you can help or provide resources.

As a maintainer of a project with almost 2000 stars on github, I sway back and forth between being allowing ("Just submit code to get what you want done. We can fix it once its in the repository") and a stickler for details ("I don't want your change until you give me tests.")I really wish I could just give everyone who submits patches commit access and let them at the repository. It would save me time. It would save you time. It would make my project better. And I don't write opensource soft

You might want to look at smaller projects. But it’s generally true that maintainers don’t have a lot of time and you might get ignored for many reasons.If there’s a project you use which has bugs, reporting them and submitting fixes is always a great way to start!