Maintenance support (offer)

[jaraco]

Hi @indygreg . I read your blog. Congrats on all of the life changes. Sounds exciting.

I'd like to offer to take over maintenance for python-zstandard and possibly also PyOxidizer projects.

Like you, I've had some life changes, but my changes have given me more time to support open source projects.

My involvement would be modest - I don't have aspirations to make any major changes to the projects. Instead, I'd be focused on occasionally reviewing PRs and issues, guiding users to explore solutions, and cutting releases as needed to keep the projects from growing stale. I'd leverage the same methodology I use to maintain the hundreds of other projects I maintain in the Python ecosystem. I might step in to make important maintenance changes, but more than likely I'd direct the community to contribute most changes. I'd be careful to maintain the stability and quality that users have come to expect, directing contributors to provide well-engineered solutions with test coverage and to be responsive to unexpected regressions. And I of course would be happy to keep you on as a co-maintainer and be prepared to hand the project back should you wish to re-engage with any of them.

Let me know if that sounds at all interesting and if you have any specific stipulations you'd like to include.

Otherwise, feel free to give me ownership access of the PyPI projects and (optional but preferable) transfer the GitHub repos to the coherent-oss org, which I've formed to share maintenance on projects.

[ntamas]

Hi @jaraco!

Thanks a lot for the offer - I hope that @indygreg will get back to you soon with a positive response. I am also relying on PyOxidizer in some of my projects for packaging so it would be great if the project could be kept up-to-date at least with support for newer Python versions.

I have a couple of commits lying around on my computer that attempts to bring the project up-to-date with newer versions of its dependencies. I am willing to offer these patches to the community when the project is revived.

[ntamas]

Quick update: I have forked PyOxidizer and started working on bringing things up-to-date. I have migrated almost all of the dependencies to their latest versions (including PyO3) and all CI tests pass, with the exception of the cross-compiled musl libc version.

I will probably attempt to add support for newer versions of Python as the next step.

[johanneswilm]

@ntamas Great! I noticed your fork still links to the pages of @indygreg . Are you planning on making releases , etc. - maybe under a different name?

[ntamas]

@johanneswilm I don't know yet; the maintenance burden seems to be larger than what I can take up on my own and I lack expertise in certain areas:

• I could not manage to get the cross-compiled musl build right for a long time
• now PyO3 yanked versions 0.22.0 to 0.22.3, which would not be a problem, but they also removed pyffi::_Py_PackageContext from the list of exported symbols in 0.22.4, wihch broke the builds for Windows. I would need to investigate what PyOxidizer is doing with _Py_PackageContext during the initialization process on Windows and whether it's really needed, but I have not been using Windows myself for a long while now so it's also going to take some time to investigate

All in all, I don't think I'll start making releases under a different name on my own unless I can get these sorted out and commit myself to dedicating more time to PyOxidizer -- otherwise it would be just another dead fork that does not really bring any benefit to the community.