Maybe I should clarify what I expect from a “maintainer”:
- Code review of contributions: This is NOT at all about doing functional tests - so no hardware needed. In fact, from the bindings that I reviewed in the past, I only had the hardware at hand for a small percentage of them. Code reviews are rather about checking code style, architecture, legal issues, etc. I have listed such things here, nothing of it is related to having the hardware.
- Actively managing the repository: Keeping track of incoming issues and PRs, making sure that they are tagged correctly and assigned to the right person or rejected immediately. This is manual work that cannot be automated and no restructuring can really reduce this work. The only solution is coming up with ways to distribute this work among more maintainers. The discussion on the best repo structures and access rights is here.