Ask HN: What's the overhead of forking and maintaining an open-source project?

1 pointriyakhanna19832 comments

If we create an internal fork of a popular open-source project, what maintenance overhead are we looking at? Particularly, when pulling security and optimization updates?

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Completely depends on how you change the code, from easy to very painful.

I'll add another attribute: popularity. I maintained a fork of a script that was rather complex, but had close to no feature requests and a handful of minor bugs. On the other hand, there is a ton of great research on burnout due to its prevalence.

One of the maintainers of some great projects wrote about taking an "indefinite sabbatical" - https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical.... He gets at the commitment in more detail.

The most complete resource I've found, on the good and bad, is @nayafia's Awesome Maintainers: https://github.com/nayafia/awesome-maintainers

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