Software is maintained by people. While software can in theory live on indefinitely, to do so requires people. People change jobs, move locations, retire, and unfortunately die sometimes. When a software maintainer can no longer maintain a package, what happens to the software?
Because of the fragility of people in software, in an ideal world a piece of software should have as many maintainers as possible. Increasing maintainers increases the so-called bus factor. A lower number of maintainers means fewer people have to get hit by a bus to then have no maintainers.
@orchid00 thanks for these! We’ll add more detailed instructions/suggestsions for these in the developer guide, but for now, here’s a quick response to the unresolved issues comment
In case the previous maintainer is reachable scheduling a meeting before take over will be extremely benefitial for new mainteners.
Good idea!
As new maintener, there are a few unresolved issues from the package that I don’t know how to fix, who may I ask for help?
It depends:
if the old maintainer can be contacted: reach out to them, and ask for help
ropensci slack: good for getting help on specific or general problems, the #general room is where many ask questions
ropensci discussion forum: this forum is a good option, feel free to ask any questions here
ropensci staff: feel free to get in touch with one of us via slack/email/pinging us on github issues, we’ll be happy to help
of course there’s general R help too: Stackoverflow, Twitter #rstats, etc.
Any venues/methods not mentioned above that should be?