sheerun
Repository maintenence, offer to host under Preservim umbrella
Hey! I'm a long time user of this plugin, but have recently run into some problems with it and discovered they have been known issues with existing PRs that have been outstanding for 4+ years. It seems this great piece of VIM history has is starting to show some broken windows. I'd like to see it get some TLC.
I founded the Preservim org on GitHub about 10 years ago as safe place to house popular VIM plugins that needed ongoing maintenance but where the original owner's attention was elsewhere for whatever reason. We house many popular plugins like nerdcommenter, nerdtree, tagbar, vim-markdown, and many others. We've successfully recruited and mentored new maintainers for a number of plugins, and kept the wheels turning—in same cases adding features and expanding, but mostly just staving off bit-rot and keeping things compatible with the current field.
Personally I have an expensive background in FOSS and security and have access to many things many of which much more security sensitive than VIM plugins and I've worked with many projects where I've taken over maintenance or helped the projects transition into other maintainer. I can cite examples if this is a point of concern.
I would like to propose this project by migrated to Presevim. The typical way I suggest handling this is the original owner should join that org and migrate the repository there. They would stick around as the repository owner with the ability to jump in at any point if they wanted to, but with no expectation that they had to continue being point for maintenance.
Once migrated, I would jump in to do some initial issue triage, but more importantly I would setup a new team. The repo would be configured such that 2 team member signoffs are required for a merge, then an offer would be opened to past contributors are people with a track record of vim plugin contributions to join the team to help with issue triage and PR review. As I have done with other project I'd watch that activity for and if there are any stand out contributors over a year or so that have consistently good contributions, I may invite them to have more privs on the repo and be able to approve PRs directly.
This sequence has played out nicely with new maintainers having taken up the mantle for tagbar and nerdtree, with many other plugins having regular contributors and I facilitate PRs as much as I can.
If you have any questions or concerns I'd be glad to address them. Again thanks for the great plugin, and I hope this offer is given consideration as a way to extend it's useful lifetime and avoid bitrot!
@sheerun I've just renewed the invitation to join the GitHub org if you want to get started, I can help step by step...