Maintainership Discussion

The Rust-ML organization and in particular, the flagship project linfa, saw quite a bit of activity a few years ago which has slowly dwindled as core maintainers have moved onto other focuses in both their personal and professional lives. This has led to a backlog of both issues and pull requests.

This is not exclusive to linfa, and has also become a topic of discussion (with successfully renewed activity) in the n-dimensional linear algebra library that linfa relies upon, ndarray. However, linfa itself is still one of the most comprehensive classical machine learning libraries available in the Rust ecosystem, with a strong base in terms of both features and code quality.

I'd like to begin a discussion to see if any members of the Rust or machine learning/scientific computing community might be interested in taking on a maintainership role for the linfa project and/or Rust-ML org at large (we technically have things like a Github Pages, Zulip and Discord community set up as well). I think the only "requirements" for this role would be an interest in the linfa project/machine learning and some reasonable level of demonstrated good-faith participation in the open source Rust community. If that makes sense, I'm happy to expand this call into other channels like the Rust Users Forum, Discord, "This Week in Rust", etc.

Thoughts?

@relf
@bytesnake
@YuhanLiin

Start by reading the maintainership proposal in issue #367 and the linked ndarray discussion at issue #1272. Review the current backlog of issues and pull requests, then determine whether interested community members can take on maintainership for linfa or the Rust-ML organization. Done means an agreed ownership and handoff plan.