<story><title>Free software hijacked Philip Hazel&apos;s life</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/978463/608c876c1153fd31/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arp242</author><text>Connecting qualified would-be maintainers with projects looking for a maintainer is a tricky problem. Who here even knew PCRE2 was looking for a new maintainer?&lt;p&gt;I took over some fairly widely used Go projects, but only &lt;i&gt;after&lt;/i&gt; they were archived. I had no idea they were looking for someone to maintain it.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a bit of a catch-22 here:&lt;p&gt;- If a project is already well-maintained then no one really needs to contribute anything.&lt;p&gt;- If a project is poorly maintained due to lack of interest or time, then this will also discourage contributions – the first think I check before contributing is whether previous PRs are actually getting merged.&lt;p&gt;For larger projects where there&amp;#x27;s always something to do, like Exim, this usually isn&amp;#x27;t a big issue. But for smaller more narrowly scoped projects like PCRE2 this is more of an issue. I&amp;#x27;m not surprised he&amp;#x27;s having a harder time with PCRE2.</text></comment>
<story><title>Free software hijacked Philip Hazel&apos;s life</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/978463/608c876c1153fd31/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilv</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure this is correct, but I made a quick guess at which is the most representative Debian package for PCRE, and got this order of magnitude of direct and indirect dependencies for it:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    $ apt-cache --recurse rdepends libpcre2-8-0 | tr -d &amp;#x27; |&amp;#x27; | sort | uniq | wc -l
    52160&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></comment>