The Role of a Maintainer

What are the expectations of maintainer of open source software libraries? What are best practices? How can we do this better?

This post frames the discussion and then follows with best practices based on my personal experience and opinions. I make no claim that it is correct.

Let us Assume External Responsibility

First, the most common answer to to this question is the following:

• Q: What are expectations on OSS maintainers?
• A: Nothing at all. They’re volunteers.

However, let’s assume for a moment that these maintainers are paid to maintain the project some modest amount, like 10 hours a week.

How can they best spend this time?

What is a Maintainer?

Next, let’s disambiguate the role of developer, reviewer, and maintainer

1. Developers fix bugs and create features. They write code and docs and generally are agents of change in a software project. There are often many more developers than reviewers or maintainers.

(continued...)

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