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As both an open source author/producer and consumer, I wish more projects were forthright about: 0) known defects 1) when the author no longer uses the librar
by mceachen 6y ago
As both an open source author/producer and consumer, I wish more projects were forthright about:
0) known defects
1) when the author no longer uses the library themselves
2) the repo is abandoned and alternatives are not given
There's a lot of abandoned code out there. It'd be nice if package managers had abandoned-package detection built-in.
- judge2020 6y agoI find the GitHub "archive repo" functionality a great, easy way to indicate a repo is abandoned; the most you need/have to do is a little readme edit/repo description edit if you want to explain or point to a good alternative.
- andrewstuart 6y agoProblem is there's no auto detection that a repo is no longer maintained. Easy to do but github does not do it.
- pabs3 6y ago"No longer maintained" is hard to define, does no commits in the last year mean "this project is mature and needs no changes", "this project is dead and should not be used" or "the author still cares about this project but is busy with other stuff this year" or something else?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CameronNemo 6y agoExactly. It is subjective. One just needs to look at the contribution history and determine if it is what they need.
- grogenaut 6y agoThe first thing I do is just check commit history for recent commits. Usually a good indicator a thing is abandoned
- franciscop 6y agoHow do you define if a small library has been stable for years?
- bredren 6y agoIssues filed. Their recency and concerns.
- thejosh 6y agoDepends on what the repo is/problem it solves. Sometimes something is considered "done", when it doesn't need anymore work to it. :-)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- franciscop 6y agoThe problem is that in practice there are many times that the visible different between "done" and "abandoned" is null, specially for smaller single-purpose libraries.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoOr mature, stable ecosystems. People use Common Lisp libraries that haven't been updated in 20 years, because they work.
- Galaco 6y agoI’d disagree with point 2. There shouldn’t be any responsibility for a (ex-)maintainer to provide alternatives themselves; especially when there may not be any at point of abandonment . Is there significant value to maintaining a set of glorified search engine results in a README? It means the list of alternatives then have to be maintained in case they too are abandoned.
- brabel 6y ago> There's a lot of abandoned code out there. It'd be nice if package managers had abandoned-package detection built-in. Dart's pub.dev does! All projects get scores for Popularity, Health and Maintenance. Here's a random example: https://pub.dev/packages/redux#-analysis-tab- https://pub.dev/packages/redux#-analysis-tab-