The Most Prolific Packager For Alpine Linux Is Stepping Away

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles.

Alice "psykose" who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages.

These Alpine aports stats put her at 13,894 commits over the past year. In comparison, the second most prolific packager saw just 2,053 commits... Or put another way, psykose has 6.7x the number of commits as the next packager. The 13.8k commits is also about half of the 26.8k commits seen in total over the past year.

Over the weekend I was alerted to the fact that psykose/nekopsykose has begun dropping maintainership of packages she maintained. All of her recent alpinelinux/aports commits two days ago were removing packages she oversaw.

Curious about the situation, I reached out to Alice and she confirmed she has dropped maintenance of anything she maintained and proceeded to lock herself out of the Alpine Linux systems she had access to. She hasn't decided what to do next but likely "catch up on a year of sleep." She doesn't believe that this will ultimately impact Alpine Linux itself but hopes that others will pick-up what's needed to keep on going with the package maintenance.

In any event, great job to her with all of the packaging work she's done for the Alpine Linux project.