Add a post about maintenance

[Kobzol]

Inspired by the recent maintainer funding discussions, I wrote a post about what I think is maintenance. I'm not sure if it's a good fit for Inside Rust, but I thought I'd share it. In case we find it's not a good fit, I'll just move it to my personal blog.

Rendered

[davidtwco]

I like this, I think it captures everything I'd think to write. I think it makes sense as a blog post, but maybe also something like it as part of our general documentation on how the project is governed.

[nikomatsakis]

Agreed, this I think captures my viewpoint as well.

One interesting question not answered by the blog post -- and I don't think it has to be, but it is a good one for us to align on -- is "how do you know when maintenance is working" or 'what does a well-maintained project look like'.

[tmandry]

I think the post looks great, modulo my one comment. Thanks for the writeup @Kobzol.

[nikomatsakis]

My general take:

There is no one definition of maintenance. That's fine. But I liked the way the post gave a crisp definition of the kind of maintenance we as a group are looking to fund -- the enabling, multiplicative work that ensures the language keeps functioning and that the org is able to extend it readily and easily to meet our evolving needs.

[joshtriplett]

@nikomatsakis

But I liked the way the post gave a crisp definition of the kind of maintenance we as a group are looking to fund

I think that's exactly the concern I'd have here: I don't think this post fully circumscribes the set of work we'd be seeking to fund, nor should it attempt to. To the extent it's "crisp", that makes it incomplete. And that's fine, as long as we don't present it as complete.

[Kobzol]

I re-read the post and realized that it does sort of imply that it tries to define what is maintenance with the connotatation that the described set of activities is exactly the thing that we would be funding with RFMF.

That was not my original intention though, so it actually surprised me 😆 I think that what happened is that I wrote the middle of the post, which was just supposed to be a bunch of observations about what maintainers do, and then I added a header and a footer (plus the sentence about feature work) to try to tie the text to RFMF (if the post was published on my own blog, the header/footer would be gone).

Anyway, I think that the text is general enough that even if someone wanted to interpret this blog post as a word of law (which clearly doesn't make sense), it contains all (or most) activities that we might be interested in funding, so it shouldn't matter.

I added the RFMF committee link, and set the publish date to next Monday (12. 1.), to have a concrete timeline. We can discuss the blog post again on our call, if needed.