This interview with Linus Torvalds on the qualities that maintainers need (in contrast to developers) and maintainer fatigue summarizes a few things I keep bringing up:
maintenance is not "bugfixing" as a lesser/different kind of coding, it's about experience, about having done a lot of things to give context to what you are seeing and to have some understanding of what second order consequences a choice might have
maintenance is about collaboration and cooperation with others, about bridging gaps between contributors and their goals
I'd have added that maintenance is #care work: Caring about and for the project/product and its development and sustainability, caring about and for the social structure that the project/product is built upon, caring about and for the people who will be using the product/project or who will otherwise be affected.
#Maintenance doesn't work without empathy, about thinking through long term consequences.
@tante It doesn't help that grants will not fund maintenance. Grants fund new shiny objects. The one time a request for proposals had the word "maintenance" in it, I was warned that an internal battle was lost so it was best not to put maintenance activities in the plan.
This is a bigger issue in open source grant-funded software than many people may know. You could get a collaborator from any number of tech nonprofit organizations.
@tante
🤨
🤔 what is described sound more like the role of an architect,
stringing bits and pieces together, understand the whole picture to communicate and find best (overall) solution - experience paired with empathy - this is an architect
dear Linux,
name it right and you might find people suitable to fill the role with dedication
@wobweger not really. A lot of the tasks of the maintainers are related to architecture but way more is deep in the weeds: Code review, thinking about long-term maintainability, etc. The subsystem people are mostly doing the respective architecture work.
In this clip, Linus is right, the code is easy, and dealing with people can be hard. It’s also important to distinguish, as he does, between developers and maintainers.
Your comments are good too Tante. I see this a lot in my project, OpenJDK.
@tante I agree with what is being said, but isn’t it a bit rich that Linus talks about “communication”, people skills and why it’s hard to find maintainers willing to work with him? Anyway, looking forward to your take on the topic.
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