3 ms·

Yes, there should be green AND red! maintenance comes in two flavors, it's absence can be a sign of good or bad, depending on the project: Very small projects

by tomxor 7y ago

Yes, there should be green AND red! maintenance comes in two flavors, it's absence can be a sign of good or bad, depending on the project: Very small projects given enough time can be cut almost perfectly up front, a few patches maybe then it's done. In this case lack of maintenance is a sign of stability and completeness. At the opposite end of the scale, in very large and _dynamic_ projects, maintenance is a continual necessity. Not only because of it's own scope being so large it's difficult to settle on a coherent, complete and bug free solution, but because of how it also interacts with many other changing external projects, in short these projects are an ecosystem - In this case lack of maintenance signifies death, instability, insecurity and abandonment. I find it particularly annoying when the latter is applied to projects fitting into the former category. Some package managers even auto-quantify package quality based on maintenance (release frequency) - looking at you NPM. Some other phrase should be used to clarify this, maybe: "No maintenance needed", although that sounds a bit unrealistic, the point is the lack of release churn doesn't mean it's broken.

DougBTX 7y ago
> Very small projects given enough time can be cut almost perfectly up front, a few patches maybe then it's done. Perhaps there needs to be a bigger distinction between "unchanging" and "unmaintained". In your example, a project could be unchanging simply because there is nothing to do, it is "done". But if a bug was found, would someone fix it? That's when maintained vs unmaintained would matter, perhaps it is only possible to know how well something is being maintained until problems are reported...
- tomxor 7y ago
  Yes this is a better distinction, I suppose the problem is that inactivity tends to be equated with lack of maintenance - regardless of whether there are still people around that care but have nothing to do.

by tomxor 7y ago

DougBTX 7y ago

> Very small projects given enough time can be cut almost perfectly up front, a few patches maybe then it's done. Perhaps there needs to be a bigger distinction between "unchanging" and "unmaintained". In your example, a project could be unchanging simply because there is nothing to do, it is "done". But if a bug was found, would someone fix it? That's when maintained vs unmaintained would matter, perhaps it is only possible to know how well something is being maintained until problems are reported...

tomxor 7y ago
Yes this is a better distinction, I suppose the problem is that inactivity tends to be equated with lack of maintenance - regardless of whether there are still people around that care but have nothing to do.