Maintainer blues

I’ve been maintaining emacs-eclim for a couple of years now. I like it, since that means I can push my commits to the repo with minimal fuss. And for a long period of time, that was all that mattered, since there weren’t a lot of other users around.

But that has changed. Over the past few months, we’ve been getting a stead stream of Github issues and pull requests. There’s even been some traffic over at our google group. It seems that people are getting interested.

That’s good.

But here’s the thing: emacs-eclim was always just a tool to me; something I kept hacking on to solve those particular problems I encountered in my day to day work. So a lot of these feature requests are things I cannot relate to. Support for PHP? Android development? Ant? I dunno. These are things I have absolutely no motivation to spend my free time on. They might be problems, but they’re not my problems.

That’s bad.

Sure I’d like to achieve feature parity with the main eclim project (right now there are a lot of commands we don’t support). It would be cool to have better Ruby and Python support. Running unit tests from inside emacs is probably a useful feature. But I probably won’t be the guy to implement this.