[Airblader]

I can promise you that in a decade of doing this, I've made my fair share of mistakes as a maintainer. There's a learning curve to everything, and maintainer burnout is a real thing, too.

i3 should definitely work on BSD, there are a few awesome folk that regularly send patches when we broke something. I don't have experience with it myself though.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Naturally, the best maintainers are those that are humble enough to learn from their mistakes. And maintainership is just hard, way harder than writing code IMO. You have to have and defend a vision for the project, and yet not be so staunch as to scare off the many users and contributors you depend on. You can't be everybody's best friend; sometimes you really do have to give a list of 18 different bugs in a 10 LOC PR, and yet somehow try to do it without completely disheartening someone who means well and wants to learn. And then on top of all that diplomacy you still have to dig down and figure everything out when a particularly nasty regression slips through the cracks.

I know I couldn't do it worth a damn, just thinking about it gives me an ulcer.

One other maintainer who I admire is Greg KH, maintainer of the Linux stable branch. 15 years ago I sent him this absolutely useless patch cleaning up the code style of a driver that was marked to be deleted and rewritten from scratch. 15 year old wannabe kernel hacker just finished his first read of K&R and wants to go straight for the damn linux kernel next.

In his reply he not only thanked me for what was basically a waste of his time, explained why there was no point taking the patch, then he went and reviewed the patch anyway! This was at least a couple kloc, and he voluntarily wasted even more of his no doubt precious time to teach me a few more things. He even responded to a follow up email asking for reading material. I'm not sure how he does it. My main hypothesis is Greg KH is secretly the identical triplets Greg, Karl and Harold and they're somehow all kernel maintainers.

That interaction, while just one in hundreds he engages in on any given day, to me was oddly enough life-changing. It let me know I was overreaching to an absurd degree, yet also inspired me to keep learning(big deal for a 15yo). And I did end up becoming a capable low level C programmer, doing some of the best work of my career in embed stuff during the brief windows my health has allowed me to be productive. It also helped me accept that I'm just not cut out for hacking on the kernel, which is fine, almost no one is.