Opening up maintenance to the community

[baszalmstra]

Hi TrueLayer team 👋

First of all, thank you for creating and open-sourcing reqwest-middleware. It has become a foundational piece of the Rust HTTP ecosystem and is used heavily by major projects like astral-sh/uv and prefix-dev/pixi, among many others.

The current situation

It seems like the crate is not receiving much active attention from TrueLayer's side lately, and the backlog has been growing. A few examples:

Open issues with no maintainer response:

• Please re-export the http crate. #277
• Retries fatal connect error #271
• Get access to inner client from ClientWithMiddleware? #203
• Compilation issue with mininal dependencies version #204,
• reqwest-tracing has opentelemetry logic even when no opentelemetry is not used #206
• Inconsistent e.is_timeout() After Upgrading to reqwest-retry 0.7.0 and reqwest-middleware 0.4.0 #207

Open pull requests going unreviewed, including several from @konstin:

• Report retry count on Ok results #235 Report retry count on Ok results (June 2025)
• Expose default handler for reqwest::Error #242 Expose default handler for reqwest::Error (August 2025)
• Remove deprecated audit action #243 Remove deprecated audit action (August 2025)
• Fix clippy lints #244 Fix clippy lints (August 2025)
• feat: expose internal reqwest::Client as reference #209 Expose internal reqwest::Client as reference (December 2024)
• Add final initialization to ClientBuilder #229 Add final initialization to ClientBuilder (April 2025)

These are ready contributions from active community members that are simply waiting on someone with merge access.

Perhaps most telling: the astral-sh team has had to maintain their own fork, publishing it to crates.io as astral-reqwest-middleware, in order to land fixes and features they needed in uv. Having downstream projects fork a crate to get basic maintenance unblocked is a strong signal that upstream needs more bandwidth.

The proposal

Would TrueLayer be open to bringing in community co-maintainers to help share the load? There are clearly people in the ecosystem who care about this crate and have the context to contribute meaningfully. A small group of trusted co-maintainers could handle issue triage, PR reviews, and releases, while TrueLayer remains in the loop on anything that touches your internal usage or the broader direction of the project.

If you're a community member who actively uses this crate and would like to help maintain it, please chime in below!

We genuinely appreciate the time and effort you have put into maintaining this crate over the years, and we understand that keeping up with an open source project on top of everything else is hard. We're not looking to take ownership away from TrueLayer. This is your project and you remain the primary stewards. The goal is simply to make sure the community's contributions don't go unanswered and that downstream projects don't have to resort to maintaining forks.

What do you think?

[konstin]

This is a concern for uv too, because we now have to maintain astral-* forks of a whole stack of crates, which thereby become incompatible with the rest of the ecosystem. It would be great to instead focus that energy on maintain upstream crates!

[eopb]

Hi friends 👋
First of all, I want to apologise for my very late response to this issue. I also want to apologise for how slow we've been in general. Everyone's patience has been hugely appreciated 🙌

It's fantastic to see reqwest-middleware used in so many important projects! Those projects have their own concerns that go beyond what we've needed internally. We often neglect to prioritise reviewing those improvements. I've tried personally to help out, but this has been very dependent on other things fighting for my attention.

@baszalmstra I think your proposal makes a lot of sense. Opening the project to more trusted maintainers is necessary for this project to work at scale. This is just something we've never done before in github.com/Truelayer, so we'll need to have some discussions internally.

If all goes well and I can get this approved, would both @konstin and @baszalmstra like to receive maintainer permissions? If others are also interested, please also comment on this issue.

[tdejager]

I'd be interested in permissions, seeing that we use it in pixi and then uv quite a bit. I have not worked on reqwest-middleware before though!