tldr/contributing-guides/maintainers-guide.md

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# 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) and
(4) have been open for at least **24 hours** unless the changes are trivial
- 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 maintainers 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.