# Maintainer's guide

The following guidelines are meant to provide a general basis
for the behavior expected of tldr-pages maintainers.

> [!NOTE]
> This text is a living standard;
> that is, it is meant to *describe* the project's maintenance practices,
> rather than *prescribe* them.
> As a maintainer, you're expected to refer to it for clarification
> about the collaborative workflows of the project,
> but also to propose changes to it
> that you feel would make it more useful
> as a guideline for current and future maintainers.

## I. Responding to contributions

- When responding to issues or pull requests,
  remember that you're temporarily the face of the tldr-pages project.
  **Be welcoming and friendly**, and if you don't know how to answer,
  ping other maintainers who you think might have a say.

- **Help keep the project responsive**.
  New discussion threads (issues or pull requests)
  should receive a response within 3 days, ideally.
  You can respond yourself
  or ask other members to provide their thoughts/opinions.
  In addition, if possible, try to hang around in the
  [Matrix chat room](https://matrix.to/#/#tldr-pages:matrix.org)
  regularly as well, or at least show up every now and then.

- **Know when and how to say no**.
  Sometimes requests or contributions need to be declined,
  at least in their current form.
  The project has developed multiple guidelines over time to handle edge cases
  — get acquainted with them, and point them out when necessary.
  Be polite, but firm: it saves everyone's time and patience
  to make expectations clear early.

- Always remember to **thank every contribution**,
  even when it can't be accepted (in fact, especially then).
  Keep in mind that
  [every form of contribution](https://github.com/all-contributors/all-contributors)
  (pull request, feature request, bug report, etc.)
  is a voluntary gift of time offered to the tldr-pages project
  by someone who cares about it,
  so make sure it's clear that we don't take it for granted.

- Try to **keep the entire contribution process web-based**, if possible,
  to ensure it is accessible and straightforward.
  If you're comfortable with Git, consider offering to perform
  interactive rebases or other command-line operations
  on behalf of contributors,
  or assisting them if they want to do it themselves.

## II. Handling PRs

- PRs should be merged once they
  (1) **pass the automated tests** (GitHub Actions, CLA signing, etc.),
  (2) have the **review comments addressed**,
  (3) get **approved reviews by two maintainers** (the second maintainer can merge immediately after approving).

- If a PR fails to get a review from a second maintainer after a few days,
  the first maintainer should ping others for review. If it still lingers around
  for **over a week without a second maintainer’s approval**,
  the first maintainer (if Owner) can go ahead and merge it. Otherwise, a message
  can be sent in the chatroom asking other maintainers to review the PR.

- If the only issues holding up a merge are **trivial fixes**
  (typos, syntax errors, etc.), and the author doesn't respond in a day or two,
  **maintainers can make the necessary changes themselves**,
  and proceed with the merge process.

- If a PR **stops getting feedback from the submitter** for more than a month,
  any maintainer can choose to take over the PR
  and make the necessary changes to get the content ready for merging.

- During the review process, make sure that contributors, especially new ones,
  are not **overwhelmed with too many change requests**.
  Be mindful of signs of fatigue (less enthusiastic responses, slower reactions),
  and relax review standards if necessary — minor issues can always be fixed later.

- When merging PRs, use the **merge strategy that produces a clean Git history**:
  If there's a single commit in the PR,
  or if the multiple commits are not semantically independent changes,
  use the `Squash and merge` method.
  (Don't forget to clean up the body of the squashed commit message.)
  If instead, the PR author took the time to craft
  individual, informative messages for each commit,
  then use the `Rebase and merge` method,
  to honor that work and preserve the history of the changes.
  For less clear-cut cases, a simple heuristic you can follow
  is that if there are more "dirty" commits than "clean" commits,
  then prefer squash, else do a rebase.

- Although having push access allows committing directly to the repository to all branches (except main),
  please **create pull requests for all of your changes**.
  This ensures that the entire process that regular contributors go through
  is also exposed to maintainers,
  who can then identify and address bottlenecks or inconveniences.
  Similarly, **avoid merging your own PRs** unless approved by other maintainers.

- At the last week of October, all applicable PRs that wouldn't get merged
 in time can be labeled as `hacktoberfest-accepted`.

## III. Transparency

- All non-confidential requests/mail made/sent on behalf of the project
 should be documented as an issue with the [archive](https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/issues?q=label%3Aarchive) label
  and must be communicated with other maintainers.
- All repository/organization settings changes must be documented as an issue with the [archive](https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/issues?q=label%3Aarchive) label.
