The future of node-fetch

(Sometimes you gotta write a clickbait issue to get people’s attention.)

The current status of node-fetch is fine:

• I believe 95% of the Fetch API use cases are covered either by us or other implementations.
• node-fetch is lean enough (150KB, zero dependency), people can write their own wrapper or even fork our code to fit their own purpose.
• Fetch API is now quite stable so we are not dealing with many breaking changes.
• In short, if you are on 1.x or 2.x releases, and it works for you, great, no need to worry.

The future status of node-fetch could be better:

• It doesn’t have an active maintainer, (contributors) all have their own lives.
• There are certainly things we would like to work on to make node-fetch easier to use. (see open PRs).

What to do?

• We need an active maintainer: someone need to own this package’s npm publishing right, and have free time and proper motivation to maintain node-fetch changelog and releases.
• We need a small team that help on non-trivial things: like making a PR spec compliant, which again require free time and proper motivation.

If you are such a candidate, or better yet, can negotiate with your employer to be payed to maintain node-fetch, let us know in the comments.

[buu700]

Tangentially related: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/19393

Implement window.fetch into core

The fact that node-fetch is even still needed just feels strange.

[bitinn]

So @xxczaki reached out to me on Twitter and said he would like to lead this project, personally I am supportive, but I asked him to reply in this issue to serve as a formal offer.

To help smooth things out for @xxczaki, I am proposing the following:

• I will add @xxczaki to collaboration team, my hope is he can start working on v3 releases.

• Once @xxczaki accepts and hash out a roadmap (what to change, what to drop, what might break etc.), we will review and agree to this roadmap.

• Once this is done, we will add his patreon page to our repo’s sponsor button, so he can potentially get some reward for his work.

• @jimmywarting, could I give you node-fetch npm package publishing right, so that you can help publish new releases, and act as a code reviewer? If you have got a patreon page I am happy to link them too 😃

• I am not active in nodejs open-source scene anymore, so I often can’t review PR or response to issues in time, so if anyone is willing to join as a backer code reviewer, I am happy to have you. (Requirement: you need good knowledge of Fetch spec.)

• Last thing I should note: I really appreciate @xxczaki offers to help, but I don’t know him personally; this was the case with @TimothyGu, who led the v2 releases; we never talked online beyond GitHub issues, and Timothy happened to be answering issues here, so I asked him for help.

OK, that’s long enough, let me know what you think?

cc @jimmywarting @TimothyGu @jkantr @gr2m

(PS: @rkzhap123, I will vote for discord, feel free to put the invite link here once you created it 😃