Help Me Help You, Maintainers
7 comments
·March 7, 2025bhelkey
Two things to think about:
One, as the article points out, supporting Maintainers is important.
Two, many software engineers don't enjoy writing documentation. Even if it would make their lives easier.
From that perspective, the majority of these complaints revolve around communication. However, this article frames documentation as something only the maintainer should be write.
Why not make a PR to update the documentation yourself instead of asking the maintainer to do it?
Instead of getting frustrated about opening a bug in the wrong place, why not document the right place?
If the description around PR criteria doesn't match your experience, why not create a PR updating it to include undocumented requirements?
jmholla
> "We need to support open-source maintainers better!"
> "Let's have a conference to discuss how to help them!"
> "We should provide resources without adding requirements."
> "But how do we do that without more funding or time?"
> "Let's ask the maintainers what they need!"
> Maintainers: "We need more support and less pressure!"
> "Great! We'll discuss this at the next conference!"
> "We need to support open-source maintainers better!"
Maybe some maintainers should be invited to these conferences? And maybe more direct communication with the projects you want to contribute to? I get the impression from the article that these conferences the author describes are more virtue signalling than an attempt to solve the issue.
I do think that advice at the end of the article is useful, but the opening makes me feel that no one's actually having a conversation with maintainers.
chirss
The list at the end isn't that good though. It's basically dictating this Matt Dugan's preferences. The third one about seven systems is both an exaggeration and a demand.
The rest of this page makes me think it would be really hard to work with Matt, and I'd probably just pass back when I was running projects. It's not worth the effort.
ziddoap
>The third one about seven systems is both an exaggeration and a demand.
I don't know how many times in the post they say some variation of "it's your stuff, do whatever you want", but it's certainly more than once.
null
alkafdslk
[dead]
As the maintainer of several popular open source projects (e.g. https://chezmoi.io), the forms of help I appreciate the most are:
* User support. Answering questions in discussions, social media, and GitHub issues. This helps on multiple levels: it saves me time that I would otherwise have to spend, and builds a community around the project.
* Documentation improvements. Better documentation means less user support work and helps everybody.
* Issue reports with a clear, minimal, way to reproduce the problem.
* Pull requests that follow the contributing guidelines of the project. This means that they follow the project's conventions, include tests, don't break any existing tests, and so on.
I don't write open source software to make money. I write open source software because I enjoy building high-quality software and I get a buzz from helping people.