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>Well, so much for catching up on these issues tonight. Maybe I’ll just add DEPRECATED to the README, that’ll fix it. Please, please, if you have too many proj

>Well, so much for catching up on these issues tonight. Maybe I’ll just add DEPRECATED to the README, that’ll fix it. Please, please, if you have too many projects like the author or myself, put a huge note in the README that it's not maintained. If you're lucky, there'll be an active fork you can point people to. I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects and setting another fork as the canonical source.

jonesb6 11y ago
Better still people wishing to make a name for themselves could just peruse the deprecated/abandoned repositories, fix them up, and maintain them. Viola, you now have a great resume item and likely learned a large number of useful skills and production-environment experience.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I tried a couple of times this year. It can quickly overtake your own projects in terms of time taken.
aaronbrethorst 11y ago
I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects and setting another fork as the canonical source. More project authors should create organizations that can live on as the canonical source of their projects. That way, there never has to be a 'slightly more canonical' fork, but instead just a new maintainer.
- avitzurel 11y ago
  This is my new habit. I always open an organization first. First, it's easier for people to contribute when something is associated with an organization, they feel the credit is more evenly distributed, it's also easier to just leave since someone can jump in with no URL changes. Easier on the users, easier on the contributors. Win
dantillberg 11y ago
> I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects and setting another fork as the canonical source. Something along these lines would be really awesome! I dream of a Github UI that helps me see/search/discover other active forks of repos, as well as relevant branches/patches on other forks (whether attached to PRs or not). When I discover projects of interest on Github without obvious active maintainers, there are often (somewhat hard to discover/find) other folks that have picked it up and made a few patches to solve issues they encountered, and these are sometimes quite relevant to my own needs.
- cben 11y ago
  github's Graphs -> Network diagram is very useful for that. (shortcut: click the count near the Fork button.) Doesn't show PRs but all PRs come from commits on some fork/branch and those you can see.
sdesol 11y ago
> I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects Would this be equivalent to implementing the dislike button for Facebook, which we know will be never implement? I'm currently indexing most of the popular repositories on GitHub (500+ stars) so they can be searched by commits, diffs, etc. and what I've noticed is: - GitHub hosts a lot and I mean lots of repositories. - People fork popular repositories like crazy but the vast majority do nothing with their forks. Would making it easier to deprecate or make it more noticeable that a repo has been abandoned be good for GitHub? Don't get me wrong, GitHub is the current leader for hosting Git repositories and the number of active repositories is still quite significant, but if you dig deeper, you'll find a considerable amount of unused/never touched repos. From GitHub's point of view, I really don't see any benefits for implementing such a UI, much like it makes no sense for Facebook to implement a dislike button.
- Too 11y ago
  I prefer comparing it to the spam folder in your email inbox rather than dislike on facebook.
Matumio 11y ago
> I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects As we see from OP, it's really hard to admit that you don't have time for your own project. Ideally, inactive maintainers will let go and give push right to whoever is working on their project. But more often, maintainers simply stop being active. This discourages contributors from even submitting bugfixes because the users won't profit from their work. (I've once seen a project with 3 forks, each containing a slightly different commit fixing the same bug.) It would help much already if GitHub displayed a prominent notice "the activity on the project you're looking at is very low, but fork A and fork B both have higher recent activity". Something like a compact summary of the network graph. (The network graph is great, but has too much whitespace and requires too much scrolling to get an overview. Especially if there are 30 forks of people just committing one local hack or config file.)
hyperknot 11y ago
While not a GitHub UI feature, isitmaintained.com [1] comes close to providing a quick overview about a project's status. When choosing open source libraries, I always go there first: [1] http://isitmaintained.com/ http://isitmaintained.com/
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  That is pretty neat and I love seeing more project statistics- however, fair warning, I was a bit surprised it doesn't scan issues older than 6 months. As a result, if a project closes all issues in either a day or ten years, it will report that the mean time to resolution is 1 day and not essentially ten years :)
- reitanqild 11y ago
  A few years ago ohloh used to be the place to check but I haven't checked in a couple of years.
mperham 11y ago
They do. You can transfer a repo to another user account. GitHub even supplies a Redirect for the old URL.

jonesb6 11y ago

Better still people wishing to make a name for themselves could just peruse the deprecated/abandoned repositories, fix them up, and maintain them. Viola, you now have a great resume item and likely learned a large number of useful skills and production-environment experience.

voltagex_ 11y ago
I tried a couple of times this year. It can quickly overtake your own projects in terms of time taken.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago

I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects and setting another fork as the canonical source. More project authors should create organizations that can live on as the canonical source of their projects. That way, there never has to be a 'slightly more canonical' fork, but instead just a new maintainer.

avitzurel 11y ago
This is my new habit. I always open an organization first. First, it's easier for people to contribute when something is associated with an organization, they feel the credit is more evenly distributed, it's also easier to just leave since someone can jump in with no URL changes. Easier on the users, easier on the contributors. Win

dantillberg 11y ago

> I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects and setting another fork as the canonical source. Something along these lines would be really awesome! I dream of a Github UI that helps me see/search/discover other active forks of repos, as well as relevant branches/patches on other forks (whether attached to PRs or not). When I discover projects of interest on Github without obvious active maintainers, there are often (somewhat hard to discover/find) other folks that have picked it up and made a few patches to solve issues they encountered, and these are sometimes quite relevant to my own needs.

cben 11y ago
github's Graphs -> Network diagram is very useful for that. (shortcut: click the count near the Fork button.) Doesn't show PRs but all PRs come from commits on some fork/branch and those you can see.

sdesol 11y ago

> I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects Would this be equivalent to implementing the dislike button for Facebook, which we know will be never implement? I'm currently indexing most of the popular repositories on GitHub (500+ stars) so they can be searched by commits, diffs, etc. and what I've noticed is: - GitHub hosts a lot and I mean lots of repositories. - People fork popular repositories like crazy but the vast majority do nothing with their forks. Would making it easier to deprecate or make it more noticeable that a repo has been abandoned be good for GitHub? Don't get me wrong, GitHub is the current leader for hosting Git repositories and the number of active repositories is still quite significant, but if you dig deeper, you'll find a considerable amount of unused/never touched repos. From GitHub's point of view, I really don't see any benefits for implementing such a UI, much like it makes no sense for Facebook to implement a dislike button.

Too 11y ago
I prefer comparing it to the spam folder in your email inbox rather than dislike on facebook.

Matumio 11y ago

> I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating/abandoning projects As we see from OP, it's really hard to admit that you don't have time for your own project. Ideally, inactive maintainers will let go and give push right to whoever is working on their project. But more often, maintainers simply stop being active. This discourages contributors from even submitting bugfixes because the users won't profit from their work. (I've once seen a project with 3 forks, each containing a slightly different commit fixing the same bug.) It would help much already if GitHub displayed a prominent notice "the activity on the project you're looking at is very low, but fork A and fork B both have higher recent activity". Something like a compact summary of the network graph. (The network graph is great, but has too much whitespace and requires too much scrolling to get an overview. Especially if there are 30 forks of people just committing one local hack or config file.)

hyperknot 11y ago

While not a GitHub UI feature, isitmaintained.com [1] comes close to providing a quick overview about a project's status. When choosing open source libraries, I always go there first: [1] http://isitmaintained.com/ http://isitmaintained.com/

mpdehaan2 11y ago
That is pretty neat and I love seeing more project statistics- however, fair warning, I was a bit surprised it doesn't scan issues older than 6 months. As a result, if a project closes all issues in either a day or ten years, it will report that the mean time to resolution is 1 day and not essentially ten years :)
reitanqild 11y ago
A few years ago ohloh used to be the place to check but I haven't checked in a couple of years.

mperham 11y ago

They do. You can transfer a repo to another user account. GitHub even supplies a Redirect for the old URL.