Tealdeer Maintainer Changes 2024 (And A Look Back)

[dbrgn]

A Look Back

In December 2015, I made the first commit for tealdeer:

commit ba0283a1e7dbdec88fabc67bd49f1bdf3aca14d0
Author: Danilo Bargen <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Dec 29 10:22:37 2015 +0100

    Initial version: Simply print content without formatting

Back then I randomly discovered the tldr project while browsing Hacker News. I was sitting in a train with 2 more hours of travel time to go, and thought that yet another tldr client would be a fun project to implement using Rust.

Fast forward 9 years, and tealdeer has become by far my most popular open source project on GitHub, with over 4k stars. (For comparison, the official NodeJS client has 430 stars and the official Python client has 590 stars.) Not only that, but it has also become part of the official package repositories of many major Linux distributions, including Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE.

Tealdeer was primarily a personal project of mine, where I wanted to experiment with a simple command line tool in Rust. The goal wasn't to support as many features as possible, it was being simple, fast, reliable and maintainable. However, the feature requests and pull requests started to pile up. Among them were many great ideas and contributions, and I'm thankful for the 64(!) individual contributors that have committed code for this project so far. But reviewing also takes a lot of time and energy.

Maintainer Changes

To help with reviews and maintenance, in late 2021 @niklasmohrin joined the project as co-maintainer. He has already helped a lot with keeping the project running and giving great constructive feedback to pull request submitters. But still, many pull requests were (and still are) open for a long time, usually waiting for my feedback. And while neither I nor Niklas owe anybody anything (free software is provided "as is" after all, without any responsibilities attached), I still wish for my open source projects to be welcoming and responsive for contributors, especially first-time contributors.

Recently I have gotten more responsibilities at work and will soon be getting more responsibilities at home. As such, I don't think I can give the project the attention anymore that it deserves. Luckily, @niklasmohrin has agreed to take over the project as primary maintainer, and I'm happy to be able to transfer the project ownership to him. Thank you for the work you did so far, and the work you'll keep doing!

What's Next?

The rough plan:

• This repository will be transferred to a new GitHub organization called tealdeer-rs.
• The release 1.7.0 will be tagged by me and published from the new organization. All project links will be updated.
• @niklasmohrin will become the co-owner of the organization and the primary maintainer for tealdeer (including publish rights on crates.io).
• I'll remain co-maintainer, but will only occasionally find time to contribute. I don't need to be involved in decisions anymore. Releases can be tagged and published without my involvement.

It may take a few weeks until this process is complete, thanks for your patience! And thanks again to all the people who contribute to this project, to keep making it better!

Danilo

[kbdharun]

Thanks for all your work with this wonderful repository. Good luck with your future endeavours.

[dbrgn]

Organization transfer is done, and release 1.7.0 is out!

I think this is now done. I'll leave the issue open for visibility for a while, @niklasmohrin feel free to close once you feel like it 🙂

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish! (I'll still be around occasionally though.)