Even evaluating it on historical commits or issue resolution rate is not very productive, IMO. They really aren't an indication of future activity unless there

Even evaluating it on historical commits or issue resolution rate is not very productive, IMO. They really aren't an indication of future activity unless there are at least 10s of developers working on it constantly for a long period of time (say, > 6 months). I've been burned too many times by getting hopeful about what a project maintainer is going to do in the future, so my criteria is basically taking the code in it's current state and evaluating it like I would any other code. If it's a matter of opening a PR or two to get things cleaned up, and PRs seem to be merged relatively quickly, I might chance it, but I can't wait on an unresponsive maintainer to merge things. I have deadlines to meet. Ain't nobody got time for that.