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Comment by Cupprum | Hacker News Reader

The gorrila/mux project is weird and I am confused by it. Last year the maintainers archived the gorrila/mux project. Therefore i switched to another multiplexor called gin-gonic. Now as i saw the OP mentioning it in their blog, i went to take a look at the gorrila/mux project again to verify i correctly remembered the project to be archived. Apparently its not archived anymore, which brings the stability of the whole project to the question, or maybe it proves that Open Source is actually very stable. That if a project is missing developers, some other people can step up and start maintaining the solution.

But its nice that this functionality will be provided by Golang itself.

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The ownership transfer was publicly announced in quite a few places. Most notably gorilla's blog[0], but also on Reddit[1] as well as HN[2], though it didn't get much reaction on HN.

[0] https://gorilla.github.io/blog/2023-07-17-project-status-upd...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1528e25/gorilla_web...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935541

Yes, but the ownership transfer happened quite some time after the project was tagged as archived, which from my side was a flag to move to a solution which is actively maintained. But i am glad to see that the project is getting attention again, i liked using gorilla/mux. But its even nicer that there is going to be out of the support for similar baked into golang.

In my experience most developers are not connected to the development processes of their dependencies. Maybe they should be, I think there's an argument for it, but with so many dependencies there's only so much time and attention. I think any migration such as this should be done on the assumption that most people won't know it's happening.

It's a bit of a catch-22:

1. I want to send a PR!

2. Project doesn't seem very active, so never mind.

Plus I'm not checking if any of my dependencies need help every day.

I took over fsnotify after it was archived because I just didn't know they needed help. Last guy spent about 5 years looking for someone to take it over. I wouldn't have minded doing it before, but ... you do need to know about it.

How much time do you spend working on fsnotify if i may ask.

I spent quite a bit of time on it last year, a few weeks of full-time work or so, but haven't spent anything on it for quite a while. There's a bunch of things I'd like to do so I'll probably spend another burst of effort in the future.

It's kind of an annoying project to work on because everything is platform-dependent (and at times fickle) so you can't "just" run "go test ./..." but really do need to test it on all platforms. BSD and illumos aren't too much trouble, macOS is already rather painful (slow), and the experience of running Windows is not something I'm able to describe using only polite terms.

Have you tried executing the tests in github actions where the tests would run on different Operating Systems?

There's an extensive CI setup, but it takes forever to run. And even if it was fast, it would still be a frustratingly slow feedback loop while developing.

Just a single data point: I am subscribing to new releases for a good number of projects but it's usually binaries and not libraries. Because I use them actively and I am interested in the changes and whether they are useful or harmful for me.

Libraries... yeah, too much work to monitor those, especially having in mind that the chances of a change affecting you negatively are likely in the fractions of a percent.

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