50 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
50 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
# Maintainers: Avoiding Burnout
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**This guide is for maintainers.** These special people have **write
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access** to Homebrew’s repository and help merge the contributions of
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others. You may find what is written here interesting, but it’s
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definitely not for everyone.
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## 1. Use Homebrew
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Maintainers of Homebrew should be using it regularly. This is partly because
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you won't be a good maintainer unless you can put yourself in the shoes of our
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users, but also because you may decide to stop using Homebrew and at that point
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you should also decide not to be a maintainer and find other things to work on.
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## 2. No Guilt About Leaving
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All maintainers can stop working on Homebrew at any time without any guilt or
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explanation (like leaving a job). We may still ask for your help with questions
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after you leave but you are under no obligation to answer them. Like a job, if
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you create a big mess and then leave you still have no obligations but we may
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think less of you (or, realistically, probably just revert the problematic
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work). Like a job, you should probably take a break from Homebrew at least a few
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times a year.
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This also means contributors should be consumers. If an owner finds they are
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not using a project in the real world, they should reconsider their involvement
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with the project.
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## 3. Prioritise Maintainers Over Users
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It's important to be user-focused but ultimately, as long as you follow #1
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above, Homebrew's minimum number of users will be the number of maintainers.
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However, if Homebrew has no maintainers it will quickly become useless to all
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users and the project will die. As a result, no user complaint, behaviour or
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need takes priority over the burnout of maintainers. If users do not like the
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direction of the project, the easiest way to influence it is to make
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significant, high-quality code contributions and become a maintainer.
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## 4. Learn To Say No
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Homebrew gets a lot of feature requests, non-reproducible bug reports, usage
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questions and PRs we won't accept. These should be closed out as soon as we
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realise that they aren't going to be resolved or merged. This is kinder than
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deciding this after a long period of review. Our issue tracker should reflect
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work to be done.
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---
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_Thanks to https://gist.github.com/ryanflorence/124070e7c4b3839d4573 which influenced this document_
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