Maintainer wanted

[matthiasbeyer]

This project needs more/new maintainers.

I took over maintainership in 2019 (IIRC) during a project at my employer back then, because I needed fixes/changes in this crate to fulfill my task at work. It worked nicely and the tool is still used at that company today and also maintained (AFAICT).

But for me, a lot of things happened since that time. I got a new employer, got new projects, had little time to work on this crate - definitively too little to fulfill my obligations as maintainer.

I started the "rethink" project for a complete overhaul of the crate, but I wasn't able to keep up the motivation and progress as much as I would have liked it. Not with this crate, but also not with the -ng efforts.

In the meantime, issues piled up here. Stuff did not work as users thought it would, changes made it in (and I only blame myself for that) that broke stuff (just look at the issues). Two years after the 0.13.0 release I thought it would be time for another release and released 0.14.0 - which seems to be even more broken than the release before.

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Long story short: I feel burned out (wrt this crate) and think I cannot keep up with the self-inflicted obligations - I want to step down as a maintainer.

I will continue to merge dependabot updates (as long as CI is green) and very simple fixes (in the realms of typos in complexity), until (a) new maintainer(s) are found.

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The process is as follows:

If someone wants to maintain this, please comment here and I will contact the owner of this repository (I do not have access to settings) to add them. If I see progress I will after some time ask them to remove me from the repository.

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My wishes for this library are rather simple: Make it work. Of course, a new maintainer has no obligations with me, I have absolutely no issue with a complete rewrite of everything in this repository - as I tried it myself with config-rs-ng. New maintainer: Feel free to take everything from that "config-rs-ng" repository and rebuild config-rs based on it if you like.

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So long, and thanks for your patience and all the contributions!

[alerque]

Long time user here, and possibly interested in helping. I've used this for years but never dug into the code to see how the sausage is made. I'll have a look later when I'm at a computer and see if it seems reasonable to take on.

[prmadev]

Hey there! I've dabbled in contributing to Rust crates, particularly with the Pimalaya/Himalaya project. I've also had the pleasure of creating and maintaining a similar internal library for our company, but this time using Go. It's been an absolute blast, and I've found so much joy in the process. I'd be thrilled to tackle something similar here, but of course with more rigor!

I totally get where you're coming from with the burnout and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the overhaul.
So, here's what I'm thinking: I'm more than happy to get involved with the maintenance side of things, but I might need a bit of a ramp-up period to really grasp the ins and outs of the codebase. If there's a chance for some mentorship or guidance to help me get up to speed on the decisions behind the code, count me in! Unfortunately, I understand if that might not be feasible given the current circumstances.

Alternatively, if there are specific tasks or areas where you and future maintainers could use an extra set of hands, I'm all in. Just point me in the right direction, and I'll do my best to assist however I can.

Let me know how you'd like to proceed, and I'm eager to jump in and help out wherever I can!

[epage]

Ill put the idea out there again for this to move into the rust-cli org. We can keep the current owner as admin.

[alerque]

I've had a look over my current usage downstream and I'm not using anywhere close to the whole feature set. I've certainly bumped into a few bugs and inconveniences along the way (hence apparently already set one contribution, I'd forgotten about that!) but I also haven't stressed it very hard and I don't have a grand scheme for rebuilding it from the ground up. Looking through open issues there seems to be quite a bit of discussion along those lines.

That being said, I would very much be interested in helping to keep the lights on … and at a level more than just bumping minor dependencies now and then. I'd like to facilitate it staying useful and relevant and even competitive. I still don't see anything else out there that fills quite the same goals. In particular it looks like there is quite a bit of PR material to work through (for better or worse).

If you want me to start chipping in, feel free to send an invite and we can work out details (repo location, org migration, crate ownership, etc.) I have quite a bit of experience across the spectrum of contributing and maintaining on both solo and team led projects.

[matthiasbeyer]

Thanks for your replies.

Moving the crate to the rust-cli org as suggested by @epage would be a really nice indeed and I would really like that. I am sending a message to @mehcode, asking you three (@epage , @alerque and @prmadev to be added to the repository and it be moved to the rust-cli org) now.

[pksunkara]

If it's moved to rust-cli, I will be able to help out too automatically.

[SamuelMarks]

https://github.com/spf13/viper is an interesting and very popular solution (in Go)

In the Rust world I was recently made aware of: Figment https://docs.rs/figment

[matthiasbeyer]

@mehcode is unresponsive 😞

[alerque]

@matthiasbeyer His activity graph strongly suggests he isn't dead though so there is hope. It's possible he's got notifications turned off for the repo and/or filtering going on (whether programmatic or mental). I know what it's like, sometimes one just puts a project on the back burner and it's hard to even notice when the existing notifications turn from generic to specific attempts to be reached.

Has email/etc. been tried? Sometimes a side channel that isn't already buried in notifications is the easiest way to get through.

[matthiasbeyer]

Yes, I mailed him 2024-03-17, but no response either.