Together for a healthier Clippy

Clippy is a very loved piece of software, with the fortune of having many contributors willing to do high-quality pull requests with very needed features and bug-fixes. We are extremely thankful for every single contributor who not only took the time to learn about Clippy’s internals, but also felt comfortable enough to show their work and maintained communication in order to ship it.

That’s why we’re addressing them with this health report of Clippy as an open source project.

The truth is that Clippy has a reviewing capacity problem, and we’ve been having it for the last few months. Unlike some other Rust teams, no one from the Clippy team is currently funded to work on Clippy, not even on a part-time basis. The burden of maintenance thus falls squarely into the maintainer’s free time, eventually leading to burnout.

We hope that the newly established Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund will be able to help secure some funding for Clippy maintainers. If you'd like to help, consider donating to the fund.

That’s why we are launching an initiative in which contributors help themselves get their pull request reviewed and merged faster.

What does this mean

Once a contributor opens a pull request, we propose they review another contributor’s pull request. That way each contributor reviews at least one pull request and nobody’s contributions get stale.

The underlying mechanism looks like this: Once a contributor opens a pull request, our dear bot @rustbot will prompt them to look at other pull requests (preferably ones without any other reviews). After they’ve reviewed a pull request, the contributor gets on a special secret list of cool ones, and priority on their pull request from the team's reviewers.

We want to thank the Bevy project and their "Open Code Review" system as an inspiration for this new initiative.

We've done this in the past

Clippy is no stranger to health updates of this kind, last year we had the Feature Freeze, which was an absolute success. In that process, we gained knowledge, trust, and the certainty that the Rust community cared about Clippy, and Clippy doing things right.

Once again, the team wants to thank and congratulate every single person, contributor or not, that cares about Clippy. Striving for excellence is what makes this linter (and language) so loved, and with the help of the community (of YOU), we can help Clippy become stronger and healthier.