Those following the polybar development have probably noticed that the last activity on GitHub was seven months ago. While I am still technically a maintainer, I have not been doing my job, and I don’t see myself doing it in the future.
Polybar is still popular (though not as much as it used to be), so i don’t want to just shelf the project, but I give it another chance at thriving. Because of that, I’m looking for people who would be interested in taking over some responsibility around maintaining polybar. I don’t want people to get into the same position I am in with the whole project resting on their shoulders. Instead, your involvement here would be as big or as small as you like. With me not being around, things have fallen by the wayside and polybar could use your help here:
- Responding to, labelling, and/or closing issues that pop up
- Reviewing and merging pull requests
- Fixing bugs
- Implementing new features
- Writing documentation: Polybar is pretty light on introductory documentation. Most of our “docs” are more like a reference manual
- Or anything else you feel like could make the project better
If you think you would like to do any of these, you can drop me a quick email the thing(s) you would like to help out with. You can find my email address on my GitHub profile.
Ideally I would like this to be a gradual transition. I’m a bit hesitant to give full admin access to any person writing me an email because of things like the XZ supply-chain attack. I also don’t want to just drop the whole project in someone else’s lap and disappear forever. So initially I would add new maintainers with triaging or write permissions, upgrading those if they want to take on more responsibility in the future.
This would of course mean that I’m still involved in the project for the time being. I don’t think there’s a way around that if I want a smooth transition to new maintainers. And while I am no longer investing time into writing code or reviewing PRs, I will commit to being available to the new maintainers during this transition, to answer any question they have. Ultimately, I would very much like to give over full control of the project to a group of maintainers.
Why Am I Not Doing This Anymore?
I first started contributing to polybar back in 2016 when it was still called “lemonbuddy” and was just a frontend, spitting out formatting tags for lemonbar. In 2017, jaagr, the original creator of polybar asked me to help him maintain polybar. Back then I just started my computer science degree, itching to do more coding next to my regular coursework. Today, I have a full-time job and besides not having as much free time as before, I also no longer have the same motivation to write code outside of work. Since graduating, working on polybar has felt like, well, work, and I’m already doing enough of that during the day.
Wrapping Up
This was kind of hard to write because I am finally admitting, more to myself than anyone else, that I’m no longer maintaining polybar, even though I have functionally not being doing it for a while. Being a maintainer here as taught me a lot, not just about coding, but about infrastructure, governance, writing, and many different software technologies. I don’t think I would be where I am today without it.
If you made it this far. Thank you! Thank you for being a part of this community and thank you for considering helping out further.
And I also want to thank everyone who has contributed to polybar over the years in any way shape or form to make it the project it is today.
I do hope that this can bring some fresh air into the project, setting it up for a bright future.
See you on the internet
— Patrick