Haml call for maintainer

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It's become increasingly apparent that between my full-time job and my work on Sass, I don't have the cycles any more to properly maintain Haml. I'd like to pass on the mantle to someone else, but I don't want to do it blindly.

If you're interested in becoming the maintainer of Haml, please demonstrate this by creating a fork of the repo and starting the maintenance process of addressing the issues and code-reviewing and merging pull requests into your fork. What I'm looking for is evidence that you'll be more diligent than I currently can, as well as the ability to both write good code and get good code from other contributors.

In a week or so, if anyone's taken up this challenge and done well, I'll hand them the reins.

• Nathan Weizenbaum, Haml maintainer

Nathan, good decision to not give away responsibility lightly.... but, I don't know how much time you need to find an appropriate candiate. Probably you want to consider to merge this pull request https://github.com/nex3/haml/pull/503 because at least we can work with Rails 3.2.3+haml in ugly-mode with that?

@EasyChris For the time being, I suggest you point your Gemfiles to @jcoleman's fork (or whichever other fork you feel is best).

I propose that we create a Haml organization on GitHub, and have a core group of maintainers. That would allow the project to grow (as well as the core group change) over time without being limited by one specific owner's repo. This seems to have become the accepted solution to this kind of problem in many of the open source communities as the idea of open source on GitHub has evolved (Rails being the most obvious example.) I think this also helps to solve two problems 1) Single developers from doing crazy things with the language and 2) A single developer not having enough time on his own.

I'd of course be willing to be a founding member of the core team if this works out.

Thoughts? Anyone else willing to participate as a core team member?

If one or two others are interested in seeing how this might work out, I'm willing to (if @nex3 will do this) create the organization with myself and @nex3 as the organization owners, @nex3 can transfer the repo ownership to the organization and I'll look into some of the pull requests/issues. That way assuming this works out, no one has to do the double work of porting back issues information to the "new" official repo.

Edit: part of my reasoning for suggesting this is that I'm willing to be the maintainer/coordinator, but I know I don't have time to fix every bug or develop new features. But I'd be willing to coordinate/oversee others involvement and be active in guiding the discussion on bugs/patches.

+1 to @jcoleman's suggestion..

+1 for a Haml organization mostly because of the same reasons @jcoleman mentioned.
Having an organization would make it much easier to find the "official" for other developers, having several partly maintained repositories it's quite hard to figure out which one is the most active / official repo (e.g. bug reporting).

I'm willing to help maintaining but time could be an issue sometimes.

+1 to @jcoleman's suggestion..

@nex3 Are you willing to try this out? I can set up the organization (with you as one of the owners) today...

Just wanted to say, thank you very much @nex3 for all your hard work on Haml over the years. You've made my life as a programmer more satisfying and more fun.

I believe that it's important for a language to have a single lead designer who has the ultimate say on both language changes and project structure. I'd like to leave it up to whoever takes over Haml how the project will be structured.

If no one steps up, however, I'll reluctantly consider making it an organization with a committee of leaders.

I agree that a language should have a "benevolent dictator", but I think Haml is at the point where it primarily needs maintainers who fix bugs/accepts patches rather than mutate the language significantly. That's not to say there aren't features that could be added, but it's not the biggest need at the moment.

I think having both (an organization and a "benevolent dictator") would probably be the best solution in order to keep Haml maintained.

I'm + 1 for an organization and + 1 for @jcoleman as the new "leader"

I'm willing to be the current leader for the project, with the caveat that I don't have time to make huge changes/feature additions to the language right now. But I'm certainly willing to head up discussions on those features and pick between proposals.

I don't know if that's too tentative for @nex3, but it's the time I have available right now.

Hi all, I did an implementation of Haml in Lua a while back and wrote Haml Spec, a test suite used by Ruby's Haml and a few other implementations. When I was working on Lua Haml I became fairly familiar with Haml's internals as I read through the source quite a bit, and submitted a few (small) fixes.

It's been a while since I've given my full attention to the project, but I do have the time and interest in maintaining Haml. My company allows a certain amount of dedicated time to open source work, and I'd be happy to spend almost all of that on Haml, at least for a solid few months. I talked about it with my work mates yesterday and have their blessing, if you consider me an acceptable maintainer.

I agree that it would be ideal to have an organization that facilitates and encourages more community contribution, as long as there's somebody who will oversee the general direction of the project.

I'm going to work on Haml a bit this week to see if I can address some of the more urgent issues in the queue as @nex3 requested. If you'd like me to maintain the project, I'm willing to do it, but if somebody else is chosen I'm still happy to make a contribution since this library is very important to me and I don't want to see it fade away.

❤️ @norman

+1 @norman.

@norman said it perfectly. "this library is very important to me and I don't want to see it fade away." I am just an end user, but Haml has grown on me in a serious way.

If there does end up being a core group of maintainers and there's room in that group for someone with more enthusiasm than experience, I'd love to be a part of it!

I've never maintained a project of any size, but I'm looking to get some experience in that area, so I'd like to throw my name out there as someone who could support the maintenance of HAML.

We use HAML for all our client work at Hashrocket and I think its fair to say that we couldn't live without this awesome project. I'd love to give back by helping, even on basic stuff. We do have company-sponsored open source time every week and I'd be happy to use it for working on HAML. Let me know if I can help!