Re: [gentoo-dev] How to deal with defunct projects (whose purpose makes sense)?

[Aaron Bauman]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 03:53:37PM +0100, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In context of the recent plan of disbanding the Samba team, I'd like to
> ask for better ideas on how to deal with projects that technically make
> sense but are currently dead/defunct.  This means that either they have
> no members, all their members are inactive or simply don't want to work
> on the specific project anymore.
>
> Of course, the first step is to look for new project members.  However,
> let's assume we've already done that and unsuccessfully.  What should
> happen next?
>
> So far I've been leaning towards disbanding the project and moving
> packages to maintainer-needed.  This has the advantage of clearly
> indicating that those packages are unmaintained, with all the common
> implications of that.
>
> However, it also has been pointed out that this frequently 'ungroups'
> packages while being maintained by a single project makes sense for
> them.  I don't really have a strong opinion on this -- especially that
> sometimes this actually helped people decide to take at least some of
> the packages.  On the other hand, Ada is an example of project that has
> been recreated after being disbanded.
>
> Do you have any suggestions how we could effectively achieve the effect
> similar to 'maintainer-needed' without disbanding projects?
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>

While I am not addressing your specific request... I would like to offer
that I think that disbanding projects is working thus far.  Of course,
some packages should be kept together, but anyone stepping up to
maintain those packages should know that and continue maintenance as
such.

Aside from this, the disbandonment efforts have proven, from my
perspective, to open the door for others to fix packages which have
outstanding bugs open.

Keep doing it...

-- 
Cheers,
Aaron