Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people? • Hacker News Board

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#21

Post by etewiah » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:37 AM UTC

dokku

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#22

Post by thibaut_barrere » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:38 AM UTC

Most of the projects I am aware of :-)

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#23

Post by ratmice » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:42 AM UTC

It would probably be easier to enumerate the small number of projects which have a larger amount of maintainers. I think the vast majority only have a few maintainers.

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#24

Post by bubblesnort » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:43 AM UTC

Expat

LibreSSL

Linux-PAM

OpenSSH

re2c

tzdata

zlib

Those are just the ones that came to mind.

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#25

Post by KeplerBoy » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:43 AM UTC

Liblzma rather infamously.

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#26

Post by ale42 » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:43 AM UTC

cba85 wrote: post #15

Php

I'm surprised to hear this, any more info?

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#27

Post by bubblesnort » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:44 AM UTC

v3ss0n wrote: post #13

suman99pro wrote: post #6

Linux Kernel

There are more commiters than maintainers can control quality.

There are also very few testers of stable release candidates for such a big project.

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#28

Post by delusional » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:47 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #18

In this thread: Wildly different definitions of what "widely used" means :) Did you know tools like uname [1] and cat [2] in GNU coreutils have essentially only had two contributors in the past decade? [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor... [2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor...

And most of what happens in those utilities is updating the copyright year numbers.

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#29

Post by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:51 AM UTC

All of them!

Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

#30

Post by Karliss » Mon, Sep 09, 2024, 10:51 AM UTC

It almost feels like it's easier to list which fundamental projects have more than one active maintainer.

Many of the core library and tools are mostly finished and have very little yearly activity. How many maintainers does a project have if the last activity was one or two commits made or maybe just merged by one maintainer 3 years ago, and few more 5 years ago. Does it count as 2 maintainers, 1 maintainer, 0 maintainers? Does the "maintainer" from 5 years ago still have commit permission and how likely are they to get involved if some merge requests show up.

Even for active projects it's very common for 90% of work being done by one main maintainer.