Christian Hergert's projects need new maintainers

Community
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Christian shared two months ago in Mid-life transitions – Happenings in GNOME that his projects need new maintainers as he has to step back. I haven’t seen this discussed here yet so I figured it couldn’t hurt to renew attention.

Christian mentioned the below GNOME modules as important and that on most he was the sole maintainer. Reach out to Christian if you maybe are interested to take over as maintainer for a module.

  • GtkSourceView – foundation for editors across the GTK eco-system
  • Text Editor – GNOME’s core text editor
  • Ptyxis – Default terminal on Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky and others
  • libspelling – Necessary bridge between GTK and enchant2 for spellcheck
  • Sysprof (co-maintainer @gbsneto) – Whole-systems profiler integrating Linux perf, Mesa, GTK, Pango, GLib, WebKit, Mutter, and other statistics collectors
  • Builder (co-maintainer @gunibert)– GNOME’s flagship IDE
  • template-glib – Templating and small language runtime for a scriptable GObject Introspection syntax
  • jsonrpc-glib – Provides JSONRPC communication with language servers
  • libpeas – Plugin library providing C/C++/Rust, Lua, Python, and JavaScript integration
  • libdex – Futures, Fibers, and io_uring integration
  • GOM (co-maintainer @hadess) – Data object binding between GObject and SQLite
  • Manuals – Documentation reader for our development platform
  • Foundry – Basically Builder as a command-line program and shared library, used by Manuals and a future Builder (hopefully)
  • d-spy – Introspect D-Bus connections
  • libpanel – Provides IDE widgetry for complex GTK/libadwaita applications
  • libmks (co-maintainer @bilelmoussaoui)– Qemu Mouse-Keyboard-Screen implementation with DMA-BUF integration for GTK

I’ve done the odd small MR for Text Editor and Ptyxis but I mostly help with triaging issues. I’ll gladly try to help more but I’m no developer so maintainer is a bridge too far for me.

If nothing else comes of this post I want to say again, @chergert thank you for everything you did for GNOME! I hope to see you back contributing to GNOME in the future.

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February:

… long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.

If you or your organization depend on this software, now is a good time to get involved. Perhaps by contributing engineering time, supporting other maintainers, or helping fund long-term sustainability. …

How might readers here know whether the situation has improved?

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The personal situation has stabilized: my family and I are now safely in France.

But the maintenance situation has not improved. I would argue it has become more concerning. We are moving into a period where AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, exploit development, and automated abuse will make under-maintained infrastructure more dangerous, not less.

I am currently unemployed and no longer funded by Red Hat to maintain these components. My involvement is therefore limited to what directly affects my own computing experience, or what I choose to do as unpaid personal work.

So no, I would not describe the situation as improved. The long-term stewardship problem remains unresolved, and reducing institutional knowledge around critical software in this threat environment seems extremely unwise.

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