Earlier this year, in March, I gathered multiple pending PRs with minor/easy fixes/enhancements in a branch I named trivial, which was then merged by @eparis. This was almost the only merged contribution since the beginning of the year and until June. @spf13 stepped by, and some long-waiting PRs, such as @jharshman's vgo support, were merged. @spf13 also replied to some other issues, and requested reviews of other users with permissions. During July, @jharshman merged a few fixes, and reviewed some other issues. On August, @BoGeM merged a PR. There have been no contributions to the master branch since then.

During this period, @broady published a tag in May (as requested in #259). This was the first tag since May 2018. In June, @bep published another tag, after merging #822.

There are new minor fixes that are being accumulated in the list of pending PRs. For example, I was about to merge all of these in a new trivial branch: #887 (+1 −0), #896 (+62 −0), #899 (+14 −1), #912 (+5 −3), #929 (+1 −1), #936 (+1 −1), #944 (+1 −1 ), #947 (+3 −6), #948 (+9 −15), #949 (+1 −1), #953 (+104 −9), #954 (+4 −2). However, I feel that such a PR might still be open for several weeks before it is reviewed and merged.

Therefore, I'm opening this issue to ask about the maintenance/governance status of this project. I have identified six users with write permissions (mentioned above), but none of them seems to be actively taking the lead. I understand that other priorities arise; hence I'm not asking any of you to step forward. Nonetheless, it is daunting for potential contributors to see PRs which are already implemented and reviewed be laying around for several months. Furthermore, some users are continuously being called, with no response; which must be annoying at some point. I think we should address this as a community.

Moreover, cobra is imported by more than 12k projects (https://godoc.org/github.com/spf13/cobra?importers) and it has >13k stars. It is a very popular project and lots of users are affected by bugs and/or breaking changes. I understand that we need to be careful with pushing changes too fast. Would it be feasible to have a dev branch where most of the PRs can be merged faster? It would allow to significantly reduce the number of open PRs, so that trickier issues are more visible.