Stow needs a co-maintainer

[aspiers]

[Also posted at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65569]

As explained in https://github.com/aspiers/stow/pull/70#issuecomment-2035884421, the current situation where I'm the only maintainer of Stow is not a healthy or sustainable situation for the long term.

I have in the past received one or two kind offers to help out, but at the time was regrettably too busy with professional and personal stuff to give them the attention they deserved. If you are one of those people, please accept my apologies and I'm glad you're reading this. If not, I need to dig out those old messages, contact the people involved, and see if they are still interested.

But in the mean time, anyone who reads this and may be interested in helping out, or just has suggestions for the best way forward, is welcome to add a comment below.

What would be needed of a new co-maintainer?

Hopefully I'm not asking for too much here! If someone has significant gaps in the below list, then most likely bringing them on as co-maintainer would be counter-productive, because if I had to spend time getting someone up to speed on the basics before getting to the complex stuff then it would be more effective to use that time to do the work myself.

• At least a decent grasp of Perl
• A decent understanding of Stow and the ability to learn how the implementation works without too much external assistance (I will be very happy to answer good questions about stuff which isn't obvious, but I don't have time to explain simple things which are already documented or easy to deduce by reading the existing code and docs)
• Plenty of experience doing code reviews
• Plenty of experience with git, GitHub, and the pull request workflow
• A public track record of contributing to FOSS projects
• Strong communication skills, to be able to help write release notes and announcements, and help support the community
• Good situational awareness and ability to coordinate with me, so that we don't end up duplicating work or causing unnecessary merge conflicts or other inefficiencies

How much time / commitment would be needed?

I don't think we need to be too prescriptive about this to be honest. If someone has the ability to do excellent work but only on an occasional basis, that's still great. We could potentially even have a team of 3-4 trusted co-maintainers all working sporadically, as long as they can all do a great job of coordinating in a professional manner. Or if there is one awesome person out there with a lot of free time who can carry a lot of weight, that would also be fantastic. I'm open to all offers and suggestions.

However the one thing I do want to avoid is someone making a very loose commitment just because they like the idea of having maintainer privileges and then not following through. I'm sure that's a very unlikely scenario, but please don't offer to help unless you're sure that you have the capacity to help. Ideally you would have already contributed to Stow by reviewing and/or submitting PRs.

[aspiers]

I have also posted this at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65569