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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

We, the maintainers, ran out of energy. We had big PRs to work on that sucked a lot of energy, then covid happened, and lots of distractions, and now we have no active maintainers. The community at times got unruly and required bursts of our energy. Will and I felt burned out on jq.

That said, I'm trying to bring on a new maintainer, and I'll try to find energy during the holidays, which is when I usually find energy for jq. Also, I can't reach Stephen, which means the only way to add new maintainers is to fork the project, which I don't want to do without Stephen's approval. I've created a `jqlang` org in GitHub just to squat on the name, but before I ever fork it, I want Stephen's approval, and I want him to accept ownership in the org -- it's his baby!

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You guys did a great job with jq so thank you for everything you've put into it. It's a tool I use multiple times a day, every day. Also, I love your documentation page!

When I saw the comment "why is the latest release so old" my thought was "because it's perfect".

It needs a bunch of love. It really needs a way to define new builtins externally, and it needs co-routines. And it needs a way to do binary (my idea: treat binary as an array of small integers, and if you ever insert any other kind of value, then you either get an error or you get an array that's mostly of small integers and no longer "binary" in any way).

If you can't reach Stephen directly maybe you can try to reach him via Yaron Minsky.

Thanks for the clue. I'll try that.

I've always been curious, what do maintainers that are trying to pass the torch look for? Surely there are a huge amount of people that offer but they mostly get rejected. What makes a good candidate?

Contribution quality. When Stephen made me a maintainer, he did it because I kept sending him PRs he liked, and he was losing energy for jq. When I asked Stephen to make Will and David maintainers, it was because their contributions were of very good quality. Problem is I've fallen way behind on keeping up with issues and PRs, so right now I don't know who would be a good candidate. The other problem is, as I mentioned elsewhere, that I cannot make someone a maintainer -- only Stephen can. If Stephen agrees to a `jqlang` org, then it will be possible for him to delegate authority to add new maintainers.

Thank you for producing such an excellent language! I'll always recommend it, its come in handy so many times and fits nicely in a lot of workflows.

Thank Stephen Dolan.

Damn, sorry to hear that the cycles became so draining.

It's such a powerful tool at surface level in this api/k8s interfacing world that looking under the hood and seeing all the work just knocked me over.

You all have done something so powerful for the community regardless of the hiatus.

THANK YOU!

Thank you so much for JQ. It has been my secret weapon in more than one instance.

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