No Active Maintainers? New Maintainers Needed? How to Proceed?

[pano9000]

Hi all,

If you look at the growing number of stale "Pull Requests", it feels like this project is more or less in an unmaintained state.
None of the (if I count correctly) 4 current maintainers is really active anymore on this repo.

This of course is not good, because it will keep people away from even trying to improve anything here.
After all why should they waste their time, if there is no chance of their changes getting pulled in.
Speaking for me: It definitely keeps me away from Reviewing Pull Requests.

It's a bit of a shame, because this is a really useful project.

How do you other people see it?
Is there any way forward here?
Or would we need to fork this into some kind of validator.js-ng project
(and by doing so also have the chance to get rid of some technological debt that is there for "compatibility reasons"?)

[WikiRik]

Tagging @profnandaa @ezkemboi @rubiin @braaar since I'm interested to see what they think.

Personally, I think adding additional maintainers would be better for the project and I would refrain from going to a fork. Most of the PRs, issues and downloads will still be going here and I think we still have the chance to revive this repo.
I have experienced the same feeling as you since I do have some refactoring and removing technical debt that I want to work on (like #1874 and #2159 ) but that I haven't worked on recently since chances of it being merged anytime soon are small

[rubiin]

I think we can pick some users from the active contributors.

[profnandaa]

I'm open to the idea of adding more maintainers to help. I think it has just happened that most of us I've been caught up with other stuff.

I'll be around to provide operational support.

Can I get some proposals for those who would like to be maintainers? Please link the currently open PRs they have reviewed.

Above all, thanks for your concern! ❤️

PS. I should get some time this coming weekend to prepare a release. I had several build errors last time that put me off.

-na

[ezkemboi]

Add to the meet for release @anthony Nandaa ***@***.***>

…

On Tue, Mar 5, 2024, 4:19 PM Anthony Nandaa ***@***.***> wrote: I'm open to the idea of adding more maintainers to help. I think it has just happened that most of us I've been caught up with other stuff. I'll be around to provide operational support. Can I get some proposals for those who would like to be maintainers? Please link the currently open PRs they have reviewed. Above all, thanks for your concern! ❤️ PS. I should get some time this coming weekend to prepare a release. I had several build errors last time that put me off. -na — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2376 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ALVWPH5GFWRXWR4HIBHHWS3YWXA57AVCNFSM6AAAAABDL4FEE6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSNZYG43DEMJSGE> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[braaar]

I think I would have to decline a full on maintainer role even though I am rather invested in this library. My time needs to be prioritised downstream in https://github.com/typestack/class-validator, where I am now a maintainer.

As with class-validator, I don't think a rut in activity is a reason to fork and divide the community. We rather need to focus more on building a community of people helping each other out. For class-validator we have set up a triage team to help handle much of the issue and PR workload.

[smngvlkz]

If the workload is too much for the current maintainers. I am open to becoming a maintainer here too, just to open, close or label issues. Honestly just offering my services to lighten the load and make this project better.

[rubiin]

@profnandaa what do you think on onboarding few new members from active contributor list

[profnandaa]

I'm down for that.
Also thinking of having you and @WikiRik finally take full maintainer (merge) roles -- also can get ready to prep the next release.

I'll have the publishing rights for now but also work on transitioning that too.

We'll just need to establish a few ground rules on ownership and responsibility. I'll work on that.

[rubiin]

Sure thing. Down to that as well

[ezkemboi]

@profnandaa yes, please do the ground rules on ownership and responsibility and all will be good.

[pano9000]

any news on the ground rules mentioned above?

I would like to be more active here as well, but currently my time is not fully permitting it, but that hopefully should change within the next 6 months

[rubiin]

For now, I only have access to the repo . So anything related to publishing the package on npm is sadly out of my hands.
I think reviews aside, we should be doing a regular version update following semver so as not to push loads of changes in a single release. This would help the library maintain its active presence too

[titanism]

There are several core bugs that were fixed in this package, so we should release something for the community since npm access is no longer available. We're publishing @forwardemail/validator in the interim, as we will maintain our own fork for @forwardemail (https://forwardemail.net).

[titanism]

I have emailed @chriso and @profnandaa to request ownership access for our company @forwardemail so we can maintain this project for the community moving forwards 🙏 Note we'd keep it here as-is and not going to move the repo or anything like that. We're not going to change license or anything remotely close to that if granted. We simply want to help maintain the project on GitHub/npm so we don't have to change package names and can keep the community moving forwards.

[titanism]

Note that we've fixed npm run build and other npm publishing issues per forwardemail@e3b9a07 (there was an issue with rollup/babel). We use np for publishing to npm and it runs tests and all for us automatically, see https://github.com/sindresorhus/np.

[titanism]

@forwardemail/validator v14.0.0 published, see release notes at https://github.com/forwardemail/validator.js/releases/tag/v14.0.0

The changelog is pretty huge since last release to npm of v13.2.0!

[profnandaa]

@forwardemail/validator v14.0.0 published, see release notes at https://github.com/forwardemail/validator.js/releases/tag/v14.0.0

The changelog is pretty huge since last release to npm of v13.2.0!

Please do specific PRs from your downstream fork. We will work on a release in Jan/Feb period.

[titanism]

This commit specifically you would need to merge in order for tests to pass. It's only ~2 lines of code changed and some version bumps: forwardemail@e3b9a07

I recommend you use https://github.com/sindresorhus/np to do the release, as an example it's what I used to publish v14.0.0 of our package - this should let you do a release much faster with passing tests to get a release out before Jan/Feb.

[titanism]

Additionally, because the changelog is so lengthy since the last release, the simplest thing you can do is either a major or minor version bump. To be honest I would do a minor bump, and release v13.3.0, as I do not see any core breaking changes in the changelog since the last release. The changes that are questionable, to us, are expected behavior and should go out to users for their own safeguard. For example, there's multiple commits that fix the behavior of isEmail, which was previously not working as advertised in older versions but is now properly working.

[pano9000]

@titanism thank you for your efforts here – frankly speaking, I feel like a fork is the only thing to help make this library stay relevant.

I will be taking a closer look at your fork, as I don't have any high hopes that there really will be any significant change here with this repo and the current state it is in.
And I don't think we will see any "downstream fork PRs" getting merged, or getting any release any time soon.

I personally definitely lost motivation to spend any more time on this project, seeing as that there is no active maintainer here anymore.
It just feels like spending any more time here essentially turns out to be a waste of time, as it does not amount to anything.

@profnandaa
Please don't take this personal, but it has become apparent, that that your interest in this library and/or your time availability to spend time maintaining this library has changed.
So maybe this could be a chance to also let additional people come in and help here.