Looking for maintainership

[torotil]

As it seems @BurntSushi the original author of this software doesn’t have time to create new releases of this tool at the moment — which is perfectly fine and great that he openly communicates this!

Since this is useful and popular software and there are many contributors to this project it would be sad to see it decline. As such this seems a great opportunity to spread the maintenence burden over more people.

In order to do that we’ll need:

• Someone (ideally more than one person) to step up as maintainer for this project. Maybe @Yomguithereal and/or @jqnatividad who are the maintainers of the currently most active forks?
• @BurntSushi to hand over the necessary resources once a new team has been found. Are you willing to do that?

Although I’m a developer myself I haven’t done anything with Rust yet, but I’m happy to help out with administrative tasks.

Also please let me know if this steps on any one’s toes. That’s definitely not the intention!

[BurntSushi]

Thanks for writing this, I appreciate it. For the future, I think something like this would be better sent as an email first. (And if you did do that and I missed it, my apologies.)

While I haven't been able to do much with the project in the last couple years, I'm not quite ready to abandon it. I do have a major refactor in progress, but it's going to take me some time to complete. I realize this isn't ideal, but it's where I'm at in the moment.

@BurntSushi to hand over the necessary resources once a new team has been found. Are you willing to do that?

To a first approximation, I'd say that I'm not. Or more specifically, my bar for doing so is exceptionally high. I've handed maintenance of projects over to others before, and it has had mixed results. Because of that, and the risk of supply chain attacks, I am generally very hesitant to hand over the project unless I'm very sure that it's in good hands.

For that reason, in recent years, I've favored deprecation and carrying things on in a fork. In this case, my pace is pretty close to glacial, so if folks want to carry the project on in a fork, that might be the best path forward. I might request giving the project a different name though, because I do at least intend to at some point breath life back into xsv.

[torotil]

Thanks for the quick answer and sorry for dragging this into public.

… I'm not quite ready to abandon it.

I’ve not meant for you to abandon the project. I’ve mainly asked for the possibility for others to co-maintain the project … and only if needed to take over maintainership entirely.

In this case, my pace is pretty close to glacial, so if folks want to carry the project on in a fork, that might be the best path forward.

Thanks for communicating this openly. I think it’s all the more important that this information is visible to possible contributors. It definitely increases the likelihood of someone creating such a fork. (That‘s part of my reasons for making this public in the first place.)

In the past I was often in the position of trying to contribute to dead projects that still seemed active. Accumulated I think I’ve wasted months of my life on this. I also was repeatedly in the position of handing over maintainership of projects. So I guess I understand both sides.

[jqnatividad]

xsv is a fundamental part of the data-publishing pipeline in a project I’m working on. That’s why I created a fork, as xsv has allowed me to outsource a lot of non-trivial data transformations to xsv that would have taken a lot of time - in both development and execution time.

@BurntSushi , just wanted to let you know that I’ll go ahead and give the fork a different name (of course, maintaining all attributions) as I’m shepherding several modifications, primarily in stats (date type detection, modes, variance), that my project requires.

Regardless, like @torotil, I’m a big fan of the project and look forward to the next major version of xsv once you do find time to work on it!

[jqnatividad]

@BurntSushi @torotil it took a bit longer than expected, but I finally got around to creating the first release of qsv :)

https://github.com/jqnatividad/qsv/releases/tag/0.14.0

I look forward to your feedback!

[pepa65]

At this point, qsv is probably the replacement for xsv, until @BurntSushi's refactoring is done.

[harrybiddle]

@torotil I appreciate this having been made as a public post.

I love xsv, but the state of maintenance of this project is not so clear. I was looking for a tranpose feature, and it took me down quite a rabbit hole to eventually find this post, realise that the project is not being so actively maintained, and that there is a good fork.

@BurntSushi would you consider putting a notice on the README regarding the status of the project and pointing people, if only temporarily, to the fork? It will just help save some people's time I think.

[Yomguithereal]

@harrybiddle both main forks (qsv and xan) have a transpose command that might fit your need indeed. This said, I feel it is a bit weird to ask a maintainer to advertise a fork?