node-bunyan maintenance
This is a mea culpa on node-bunyan maintenance.
I’m thankful for all the positive feedback I get for this project. However, I can understand that it must be frustrating for users when there are large time gaps in maintenance of it — as has been the case at the time of writing and in the past — and especially with PRs that languish.
Bunyan started out as a small project to scratch an itch at work, significant chunks developed on my own time — and it is working quite well for mine and my work’s use cases. It got moderately popular. I added features (typically initiated by feature requests or pulls with a good start) that I don’t personally use. Node has seen a flurry of releases. Bunyan includes a platform-specific binary dep. The test suite requires root access to fully run (because of dtrace integration). These add up to there being a lot of maintenance traffic for issues that don’t affect me directly. But it has one effect: guilt.
There are features I’d love to add to Bunyan, and have wanted to add for quite a while. However, I never feel right diving into those with all the outstanding bugs that block usage for some use cases. Those issues take a lot of energy (clarifying, reproducing, fixing, testing, documenting) and after a while the built up wall of them makes it hard to start.
Time for a plan and perhaps, eventually, some help.
The plan: https://github.com/trentm/node-bunyan/issues/335
Please read Bunyan’s contributing guide if you are interested, and be aware that I’m still attempting to make a pass through all the issues.
My hope is to get through issue #335 over the next few weeks, including a triage of all issues and PR and having a clearer formula for triage and a short term roadmap. Then ideally I can share some of the maintenance work with others. Thank you to many for great PRs, patience, polite issue conversations, and offers of maintenance help.