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Comment by burntsushi | Hacker News Reader

As the maintainer of ripgrep, I'd like to respectfully ask you not to harass other maintainers of open source projects about how they spend their free time. I've been where ggreer is and it's not pleasant. I completely understand their position, and a little empathy on your part would go a long way. In an ideal world, the maintenance status of a project would be mentioned in the project README, but speaking from personal experience, this is seemingly difficult to do in practice.

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In what way is updating README.md difficult? Please have as much respect for contributors and potential contributors as you seem to have for maintainers. They're all people after all and their free time is equally important.

In theory, I agree. But again, speaking from personal experience as the maintainer of several somewhat popular projects, it is actually emotionally difficult to update the maintenance status. It appears trivial from the outside, and to some extent I agree with what you're saying about being respectful of others' time, but we should nevertheless do our best to be kind to others. Calling out a maintainer in an off topic comment is not being kind.

You are completely right. I apologize.

I respectfully disagree with you. I wasted perhap 10 hours of my life or more on this PR (pointlessly rebasing it a few times). 95 other PRs are outstanding. There are many ways to improve this situation. I pointed two of them out:

    1. Declare that you won't accept (or even review) them, preferably at the top of README.md *
    2. Give a second person merge status.

I have some empathy for the maintainer but I also have empathy for the prospective contributors who spent a chunk of their free time working on https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pulls

I've done my bit here to stop wasting people's time globally, I don't consider a maintainer's time more valuable than a contributor's time. That's elitest nonsense.

https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/1284

* The likely side-effect is a unblessed fork (or people not wasting their time, or if they do, well, they didn't read the README.md and cannot be too annoyed at anyone but themselves).

Come on dude, I just want to enjoy my long weekend. Please stop bothering me by creating spurious issues on my GitHub repo.

OK sure, but would you consider merging one PR that explains that people should not expect PRs to get reviewed? I'm happy to do the work if you'll review and merge it.

That way we can avoid unfortunate incidents such as this in future.

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