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

[Michał Górny]

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