Interpolations.jl needs a new maintainer

Interpolations is a native-Julia package for performing interpolations. Tomas Aschan and I wrote most of the package in the well-before-Julia-1.0 days, and since then I’ve been the primary maintainer. The package has received a good number of contributions from many other people over the years.

I’ve written so many packages that I can’t maintain them all, and Interpolations is a focused project that is very well suited to becoming the “pet project” of someone else. In a rapidly-growing community of Julia developers and users, for its long-term health it really needs a person who can dedicate time to it.

I have decided that it’s in the best interest of the community to force the issue by announcing my retirement from maintaining the package. I will continue to make fixes or enhancements that affect me personally, but I will no longer fix bugs, add features, engage in massive rewrites (Break all the things by timholy · Pull Request #226 · JuliaMath/Interpolations.jl · GitHub), or coach others in how to use it.

To simplify the transition, I’ve submitted a PR adding considerable “developer-oriented” documentation to the package (Add developer docs and a note about abandonment by timholy · Pull Request #365 · JuliaMath/Interpolations.jl · GitHub). I invite potential maintainers to review that pull request and the package code itself. I will leave that PR open for at least a week to address any feedback; I welcome comments like “please add a docstring to X” or “this part is confusing, can you explain more clearly?” I will do my best to address such feedback.

Once it merges, my retirement as maintainer will be official. For a period I will make a dedicated effort to review PRs from a budding maintainer; I want this transition to be as smooth as possible. Once such a person is well established I will be happy to confer administrative privileges for the package as a whole.

It’s great to see fundamental packages getting so much use, and I look forward to seeing an energetic new maintainer take Interpolations to new heights of awesomeness!

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Hi Tim,

I mentioned my interest via Slack earlier as I anticipate I will be a heavy user in the future. I just writing here to also publicly state this.

I am currently engaged in developing JavaCall.jl, but I am starting to take a look at Interpolations.jl.

-Mark (@mkitti on Github)

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This is wonderful news, thanks so much for stepping up, Mark!