I have heavily used open source software for several years, but now that I'm finally ready to dive in as a developer, I found myself not even knowing this very basic thing: what do maintainers do?As their name suggests, maintainers probably maintain software by fixing problems, bugs, etc. They are also often project or sub-project leaders, and do the official release builds, etc. However it seems some maintainers also add new features besides just maintaining old ones.What are the general things that open source software maintainers do? Is it just another word for project leaders?
What do open source software maintainers do?
project management
It may be easier to think about this in a negative sense, i.e. what are the responsibilities of someone who contributes to a project but isn't a maintainer?If I submit a patch to someone else's project and that patch gets merged in, I am an author of the project.  However, I may never look at the project ever again.Maintainers, then, are the people who do anything and everything beyond that.  What they specifically do depends on the project, their interests, and their schedule, but generally speaking they are responsible for anything that needs to be done (even if they don't do the actual work and just ensure that someone else does it).