Adding additional maintainers to support project growth

@jcrist

First off, thank you both so much for this incredible library. msgspec is an absolutely fantastic tool, and it has become a vital piece of infrastructure for many production applications. We all really appreciate the hard work you've put into it!

I wanted to open a gentle follow-up to #875. I've noticed a few recent issues (like #979) where users are expressing uncertainty about the project's status. I want to be entirely clear: this issue is not a complaint about the pace of development. We all know open source is volunteer-driven and your time is incredibly valuable.

It was great to see @ofek brought on to help out, but it looks like activity has naturally slowed down again, and a few seemingly straightforward PRs (like #824) have been waiting a while.

As a concrete example of its growing impact, the Litestar framework now uses msgspec under the hood - which is super exciting! It really demonstrates that msgspec is powering real, production-grade projects.

Since msgspec is being used so actively across the ecosystem, would you be open to adding another maintainer or two from the community to help share the load and manage the growing backlog?

Unfortunately, I'm not a C expert and don't have the time to step up as a maintainer myself.

Thank you again for everything you do, and for giving such a great library to the community! ❤️

msgspec is dead, move on

@jcrist

I've been actively contributing to msgspec (PRs #993, #994, #995, #996, #997) and have tried to reach out to @jcrist directly via email asking to add maintainers - no response.

I also contacted @ofek, who confirmed he doesn't have the permissions to add new maintainers or manage the repository. He has also emailed @jcrist himself but hasn't heard back either. Unfortunately, @ofek has indicated he's no longer planning to be involved with the project going forward.

So the situation is: the sole owner is unreachable, the only other person with any access can't grant permissions and is stepping away.

In the meantime, I've created a temporary community fork - msgspec-arise, now available on PyPI:

pip install msgspec-arise

It's a drop-in replacement - import msgspec works as before.

I'll continue trying to reach @jcrist through LinkedIn. If he returns and resumes maintenance, the fork will be merged back into the orignial project.

In parallel, I'll be reviewing pending PRs and merging the ones that are ready. I'll be very thorough about this - reviweing not only myself but also with Claude Opus 4.5 at maximum effort (I have the $200 subscription), so nothing slips through carelessly.

If any issues or PRs are critical for you and you'd like them prioritized - reach out to me at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

If you're willing to help review issues and PRs - you are welcome, I'd really appreciate the help.

I couldn't find a LinkedIn account, also searched Google for any contact information.

Here's what I was able to find:

https://bsky.app

Twitter/X

It's a drop-in replacement - import msgspec works as before.

not a good idea - if a project has a transitive dependency on the original, it's a conflict and undefined python behavior

Agreed, fair point. I'll switch to import msgspec_arise as the package namespace.

@jcrist

have tried to reach out to @jcrist directly via email asking to add maintainers - no response.

Apologies for the delayed response. You emailed me 7 days ago while I was on vacation, I'm just getting back online now. 7 days from first contact to a fork feels a bit rushed IMO 😉.

That said, as I've noted elsewhere, I definitely don't have capacity (or interest) to maintain msgspec anymore. I'd very much welcome additional maintainers. Issues like this ("can you add new maintainers please") aren't very helpful though, since of course I'd welcome more contributors, but if no one is stepping up directly to volunteer than a request for more contributors doesn't really help.

If you @Siyet are interested maintaining msgspec proper, I'd be happy to add you to the repo. I'm also happy to migrate this out of my personal github and into an org (if someone volunteers to do the work).

@jcrist

@jcrist Fair point - I did act hastily, and I apologize for that. Here's the timeline from my perspective:

This issue had no response for 3 weeks
No commits to the repo in ~5 months
CI was broken
And then the "msgspec is dead, move on" comment landed - that's when I felt I had to act before the community started migrating away

That's why I reached out to @ofek first, who confirmed he doesn't have permissions to add maintainers or manage the repository. At that point, a fork felt like the only option.

With all this activity I didn't intend to take the project away - I just wanted to keep the package's userbase from scattering. Now that you're here, there's no need for the fork.

Could you please grant me:

Write access to merge PRs
Permissions to publish releases to PyPI

In parallel, I'll reach out to major projects that depend on msgspec (Litestar, for example) and see if any of their GitHub orgs would be willing to host the project. Once I have something concrete, I'll email you and we can discuss the migration details.

I've sent you a collaborator invite on GitHub. For now I'd like to maintain PyPI ownership (I know you mean well, but I don't personally know you and want to see demonstrated responsibility before extending too many permissions). Releases are all automated via GitHub anyway, so you should never need direct PyPI access.

Re: org - IMO it'd be best to have a dedicated org for msgspec, just to avoid looking like it's part of any one framework. GitHub orgs are free and easy to create, so I don't see a strong reason to rely on an existing org. The main effort is migrating the docs/links/repo infrastructure.

Thanks again for volunteering to take on maintenance efforts, I really appreciate it.

Because I'd already promised a new release soon to one user, I'm going to merge a few critical PRs today before cutting a release via GitHub.

Thanks, I actually didn't mean PyPI access.

I meant a minimal set of permissions to be able to make new releases.

What you've granted me is more than enough.

@Siyet

@Siyet I was just responding to Jim's email. It would be great if you'd be willing to officially become a maintainer here! Some notes:

In my correspondence to you I was mistaken: Jim actually did send an invite to Alyssa several months ago after our video call. Perhaps it got lost in the slew of emails and notifications many of us experience.
I can assist with reviews today and tomorrow but I will be away on a work trip starting on Friday, April 10 until I return in the evening on Thursday, April 23. I will have reduced capacity during that time.
It might not be on your immediate roadmap but I'm deeply interested in improving the change validation here, especially with the recent onslaught of AI slop affecting many OSS projects. Specifically, as a first step I would want to improve the performance checks so that the results of each commit to main are persisted (perhaps on a dedicated branch) and can be used on PRs to detect regressions.

If you agree with that last point, hopefully we can implement that as a precondition to merging anything that isn't a fix for a CVE or a bug affecting many users. I'll still review your changes before then of course but I think having that first is critical. Up to you!

N.B.:

AI was instrumental in ramping up on the code base and I wouldn't have been able to make changes as quickly after being invited as I did without it 😄

@jcrist

In parallel, I'll reach out to major projects that depend on msgspec (Litestar, for example) and see if any of their GitHub orgs would be willing to host the project

I don't think we'd want msgspec as part of the Litestar org as such, for the reasons @jcrist has outlined above, and also because we'd like to keep our org (primarily) Litestar related.

I'd be more than happy to dedicate some of my time to msgspec, as we heavily depend on it, and had to maintain forks of it in the past. I can definitely contribute with fixes and reviews (including getting my open PRs into a mergeable state 🙂). I don't think I necessarily need to have any permissions for this on the repo though, as I can do all that without any.

@provinzkraut

Thanks @provinzkraut! If you ever want maintainer rights, I'm happy to give you them - you've definitely demonstrated care and ability.

Also note - I just released version 0.21.0 (available on pypi now, should be on conda-forge shortly). This includes several bugfixes and a bit of feature work. Thanks y'all!

Add context about temporary fork status and link to upstream issue #990

@Siyet

This is fantastic news! I'm really happy to see @Siyet and @provinzkraut stepping up to help with the project

I think it makes sense to leave this issue open for now, just in case anyone else is interested in joining the maintainer team to help share the load.

Thanks again to everyone for jumping in and keeping the momentum going! ❤️

@TheRealSeber

Opened a dedicated issue for coordinating the migration to a standalone organization: #1015.

Keeping this one open per @TheRealSeber's request - as an entry point for any other potential maintainers. If anyone else wants to help with PR reviews, issue triage, or docs, I'd really appreciate the help. Please post here or reach out to me directly.

Hey all, just wanted to let you know that I've reconsidered my earlier stated stance, and have joined the maintainer team :)

Thank you!

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Adding additional maintainers to support project growth #990

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Adding additional maintainers to support project growth #990

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kamikaze commented on Apr 8, 2026

Siyet commented on Apr 8, 2026

Siyet commented on Apr 8, 2026

rafalkrupinski commented on Apr 8, 2026

Siyet commented on Apr 8, 2026

jcrist commented on Apr 8, 2026

Siyet commented on Apr 8, 2026

jcrist commented on Apr 8, 2026

Siyet commented on Apr 8, 2026

ofek commented on Apr 8, 2026

provinzkraut commented on Apr 8, 2026

jcrist commented on Apr 8, 2026

TheRealSeber commented on Apr 10, 2026

Siyet commented on Apr 11, 2026

provinzkraut commented on Jun 5, 2026

ofek commented on Jun 11, 2026

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