Collaborators

[gokcehan]

I have been thinking of inviting a few of our current active contributors as collaborators to this repository for the following reasons:

• Small changes that do not require any discussion can be pushed without my attention
• Old stale/completed/duplicate issues can be closed without my attention
• Development would not halt when I'm not around

Creating an organization might have been better but I'm not sure if it is worth changing the repo address at this point. I also don't know if there are any upsides/downsides. From what I understand, there aren't many differences when there is only a single repository involved. I guess we can think about it in the future if necessary.

@joelim-work and @ilyagr Thank you very much for your contributions so far. I will send you invitations in case you are interested in this.

[joelim-work]

@gokcehan Firstly, thanks for your recognition and offer. I don't think I have ever mentioned how I first started contributing to lf so I will share it here:

I have been using lf as my main file manager for a few years now. As a regular user I had always been happy with it (ever since I got image previews working) and never intended to contribute to the project. Then one day I upgraded to version r28, and found that image previews no longer worked properly for me. I was rather annoyed and immediately went to issue tracker to submit a new issue, but luckily someone else had reported something similar in #1055. Based on the conversation, I was able to work out what happened and submitted my first PR #1074.

Some time after, I was tagged by @ilyagr to investigate another issue #914. My own issue with image previews was now fixed, and at the time I wasn't really interested in contributing much further, but I decided to investigate anyway in my change was related. Since then, I have been in a constant, endless cycle where every time I helped someone I ended up increasing my knowledge of lf, and every increase in knowledge made it easier for me to help even more people.

And now I have gotten to the point where I have made many contributions and am deeply involved with the project, to the extent that it feels like another job. Sometimes, I ask myself why I do this - my usage requirements of a terminal file manager is actually quite basic, and lf already does everything I want it to. Furthermore, it is clear to me that users in general can never be completely satisfied, and there will always be requests for new features, many of which I do not have any interest in personally.

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After some thinking I will accept this offer to become a collaborator, although I have also come to the realization that in the past few months I have spent significantly more time on this than I would have personally liked. I will likely take breaks from time to time, and one day I will leave (just like any other job), but for the time being I am happy to help out here and there.

P.S.: For anyone wondering, I have indeed gone through the discussion in #950 which I feel is very relevant, and I agree with pretty much everything mentioned in there.

[joelim-work]

I have gone through the issue tracker and closed off a bunch of old issues, many of which are no longer issues or were just queries that have already been answered. I suspect there are more can be closed (e.g. bugs that can't be reproduced or feature requests that are very niche and unlikely to be implemented), but I will leave it like this for now.

[ilyagr]

Thanks @gokcehan! I appreciate it!

The amount of time I have to spend on lf varies from week to week and month to month, and it's difficult for me to promise anything, but I'll do my best to help when I can.

I've only used lf for less than a year, as a faster alternative to ranger. One day, I wanted to fix something and was amazed at how quick and easy and fast it was to hack on a Go program. So, I learned a bit of Go. Some of my contributions were more selfish; I tried my best to digest my own preferences into something that makes the program useful to as many people as possible. Sometimes, it turned out that I could help address somebody else's issue.

Many thanks to @joelim-work 's work on lf as well. In addition to the many great PRs, the care you take to get to the bottom of so many people's problems is impressive.

I think you've single-handedly improved the response time for issues and PRs fivefold if not more. This is a mixed blessing -- it is very generous and I really appreciate it, but it's not good if it feels like an obligation or if you're spending more time on it than you feel is right. Take care! I hope you'll find a pace where this doesn't feel like a chore, and then maybe we'll have you around for longer.

[gokcehan]

@joelim-work @ilyagr Thank you both for accepting the invitation and welcome aboard (not like you are new around here but anyway 😄).

You have mentioned some important points so I should emphasize them further. This invitation was not meant to ask you for more contributions. You have already been doing an amazing job for the project. This was mainly intended to make things easier. You should still decide your level of involvement yourself. It is perfectly fine to take breaks from the project when you are a collaborator. Infact, I do recommend you to take breaks (especially you @joelim-work). Keep in mind that you don't owe anything to me or anyone else here. If you disappear in the middle of a conversation, noone has any rights to judge you. We all have irl responsibilities and it is important to realize they have priority over almost anything we do in here. It is already too late when it feels like a job. In that case, you should switch to something else you enjoy for the moment. That is what I have been trying myself to keep my sanity. This wasn't always the case though. In the early days of this project, I was trying to be responsive to everything. Soon I realized that is not sustainable. Scope of lf is large enough that it will likely remain in constant development for all its lifetime. If I had started lf as a project today, I might have tried to limit its scope so that it could be reasonably "complete" at some point, but then again, I suspect it would not be as popular among other users.

[laktak]

Only saw this today but I'm very happy that you've opened the project to more collaborators! 👍

[joelim-work]

Hi all,

It has been a while since the last comment in this thread, but I would now like to send a warm welcome and congratulations to @CatsDeservePets for joining lf as a collaborator. For the past two years I have been maintaining this project virtually all by myself - during this time I have largely focused on fixing bugs, cleaning up existing code, and saying "no" to a lot user requests. As a result I have been strongly projecting my own personal views on software minimalism onto lf, and perhaps it is beneficial to have someone with a more positive outlook on things.

@CatsDeservePets, as a collaborator you will now have more power than an ordinary contributor, including the ability to:

• Merge or close PRs
• Add labels to, pin, and close issues
• Create new releases

Regarding the workflow, I have not written it down anywhere but I normally do the following:

For PRs:

1. Ensure that the documentation is generated correctly by running gen/doc.sh if there are any changes.
2. Submit the PR.
3. If the change will impact users (comparing to the code from the last release):
   1. Add a breaking/new/fix label
   2. Set the milestone for the next release
   3. Update CHANGELOG.md

For new releases:

1. Run gen/doc.sh to regenerate the documentation. Note that the lf.1 man page should contain the current date as it specifies the date of the release.
2. Update CHANGELOG.md so that the unreleased section is renamed to that of the new release.
3. Create a lightweight tag in the form r123.
4. Push the tag, which should trigger the release pipeline.
5. Copy the contents of CHANGELOG.md into the description for the newly created release.
6. Close the milestone, and create a new one for the next version.

There is no set rule for when to create a new release, I normally just created one when enough changes had accumulated, or when there was a bug fix needed to be released urgently. Also note that I have recently cleaned up the release pipeline - it works when I tried it on a test repo, but there is always a possibility that something could go wrong here.

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So now that you have joined, I plan to take a step back from development (but keep an eye on things) so that you have a chance to work on things yourself without having to depend on me. If you have any questions, feel free to tag me, but otherwise thank you for stepping up and taking on this role.