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Ask HN: What should I do with my abandoned project?
I wrote a Clojure IDE[1] in Objective-C with a good chunk of it (parser/lexer) written in C. But I gave up on the effort, because of difficulties integrating a scripting language with C, and because writing in C is kind of annoying.
At this point, the project is probably dead. It's currently only barely useful. Should I take it down, or leave it up?
I could see one argument for taking it down being that it might confuse people who are looking for a real IDE and find it somewhat-broken instead.
On the other hand, one argument for leaving it up could be that someone else might take it over.
And maybe there are more things I'm not taking into account. Hence I come to you for advice.
[1]: https://github.com/sdegutis/leviathan
- viraptor 13y agoPlease don't take it down. I'm not even interested in either Clojure, IDEs, or Obj-C, but I ran into many "abandoned" projects before which had a useful part somewhere inside. Or used one api call in a way I wanted, but couldn't get to work because of some silly detail. There's a lot to learn even from completely broken project. Even if noone uses the project for what it was intended, please leave it there. You marked it as dead already, and that's cool. Since you don't pay for the public repos, just leave it be.
- sdegutis 13y agoIt seems like it would be difficult to extract useful algorithms from an existing codebase. And the OCD/minimalist in me wants my github to only have useful projects on them.
- willismichael 13y agoI'd say leave it up. It's part of your history, something that shows that you put a lot of effort into something, even if you didn't perceive it as "successful". You undoubtedly learned a significant amount during the project, and the repo stands as proof of that.
- brudgers 13y agoPut a notice at the top of the readme.md letting everyone know you plan to take it down January 21, 2015 unless there is feedback indicating that people are using it. Provide a means of feedback and make your decision based on what you get or don't get.
- sorahn 13y agoI think putting a notice is a good idea, but if there's nothing personal or secret in it (db connections or anyting), just leave it in your github so people can find it. It'd be really cool if github let you mark a project as 'abandoned' so people can easily see that it's not in use.
- brudgers 13y agoOn the top shelf in a box in a closet in my parents' house there is a box of 5 1/4" 360k floppy disks that I saved with the thought that their contents might be useful someday. Now we''re a couple of decades past the time when they were already so old as to be stuck in a box in a box in a closet. They're no more collector's items or antiques than abandoned half broken code is a valuable resource today. In fact, my old floppy files have the advantage of not cluttering up a Github search when someone is looking for working code.
- sdegutis 13y agoI wrote a Bomberman-like engine in QBasic when I was 13. Many many times since then have I wished I hadn't lost that floppy disk.
- xauronx 13y agoMan I'm the same way! I would kill to have access to my young teenage QBasic code. No idea how terrible it would be, but I would just love to have it for nostalgia.
- krapp 13y agoSomeone should make a github like site specifically for dead or abandoned projects. People could put stuff up there either for advice, or other people could 'take' ownership of them.
- sdegutis 13y agoThanks for the suggestions everyone. I remembered there are some forks floating around on github. And while they might not be completely up to date, they probably contain the important parts of the code that someone might want. So I took it down.