| I wish it were. Unfortunately, not all projects are blessed with such lovely and helpful maintainers like Sam, Brad, Tim (for Backbone), and Nami-Doc, Michael, and Demian (for CoffeeScript), just to mention a few. In practice, you'll rarely find a jQuery ticket (for example) that doesn't have to be read in the end by Dave, and you'll rarely find a Bootstrap ticket that doesn't have to be read by Mark: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7334 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7333 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7325 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7320 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7324 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7312 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7302 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7296 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7290 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7282 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7279 https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/7265 ... and those are just a random smattering from the past week! |
It would be nice for Github to provide some administrative tools or interface changes to make maintainers' lives easier. However, I am tentatively in agreement with the posters who suggest that this is largely a management problem.
I've read the examples you linked, Jeremy, but I don't see why those issues (and the majority of issues on large-scale projects) require review by the head maintainer/BDFL. Most of these issues are chaff - either they're not reproducible, poorly explained, or requesting features which have already been discussed and dismissed. It shouldn't need Mark's or your time to say "nope, works for us" or "already decided we're not doing that".
At Coffeescript/Backbone/Bootstrap/etc levels of activity, you have a huge, vibrant community. Out of all those thousands of developers, surely there are a couple of active contributors who can't commit to the project at the "core dev" level but who have to skill and time to take on the role of "issue maintainer"?