Re: Resuming maintenance

On 10/01/2022 20:47, Mike Dalessio wrote:
> Although I'm relieved, the potential loss of maintainers from the project 
> <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/319#note_1348651> was 
> alarming. Perhaps another goal to consider for the year is to expand the pool 
> of contributors and maintainers. I (and others, I assume) am interested in 
> volunteering more time so that the burden isn't carried by you alone, and so 
> that if in the future you're unable to secure funding the user community will 
> be able to sustain that loss.
> 
> Thanks again, and please think about what work volunteers can pick up to get 
> more involved.

Anyone is invited to help with maintenance. But I can't think of many simple 
issues for people to get started. Fixing bugs and reviewing merge requests 
often requires deep knowledge of the code base which in turn requires to 
invest considerable amounts of time. On the other hand, everyone has to start 
somewhere. The best way is probably to start working on interesting issues, 
learn from any mistakes you make, and repeat.

Personally, I think the main problem is funding. The pool of competent 
programmers willing to spend months of their time to work on a rather outdated 
code base implementing mostly legacy technology for free is tiny or even 
non-existent. It's really the large corporations who could make a difference 
by sponsoring OSS maintenance directly. I'm sure you can find people like me 
who would work on OSS at a discount, but not without any monetary compensation.

Nick