Have you been checking it out at all again, or are you considering it?
No. I have my doubts about yet another announcement and nothing I've seen since I stopped contributing suggests that the project will provide anything I need that I can't get better elsewhere.
Frankly, I'm not sure I'm up to that. I don't have much in-depth experience with this project, with the finer points of zsh, or with maintaining projects in general. I'm not entirely sure I could do a better job than nothing at all. However, even if I were more capable, I still don't think it's right to try to take over someone's project without some more clear sign that they are uninterested in continuing it.
No it’s actually terrible. Because then they will eventually abandon the project and you’re stuck with it in your stack. Now you become the maintainer.
Was it something you were interested in? Replaced an alternate you were working on?
I find it hard to believe that a project you didn't create became something you actively wanted to support. On top of that, if the old maintainer really walked away completely, and they don't answer questions, you're walking through the dark.
I feel bad about past projects where nobody else has stepped up to maintain it, which slowly code-rot as people discover issues. It's as bad as unfinished projects I never had the ideas or motivation to flesh it out into something useful.
I do have too many to maintain but there is such a thing as them being "done". Projects don't have to be active to be useful, plus it's open-source, I'd rather keep them around for other people to fork/leverage/maintain than delete them to make way for new projects. The real problem are the subjective ones like Jade/Stylus where the scope is limitless and everyone has a different idea of what they should have.
Not trying to be rude here, but what happens when the work is no longer interesting? You abandon it? Much of the work I find needs to be done - even on "cool" projects - is decidedly uninteresting (refactor XYZ, etc).
While the offer is genuine, and I'm sure you'll get some offers, I just can't help thinking that a few weeks down the line the honeymoon will wear off. Nothing wrong with that, but everyone needs to prepare for that.
Total plug here, but please don't wait until you die to allow others to maintain the projects you've lost interest in. I'd encourage you to take five seconds and add them to the Code Shelter (https://www.codeshelter.co/).
This simultaneously sounds like a fun idea, but I can't imagine any project owners/maintainers being too happy about this being applied to /their/ project.
I don't understand why project leads straight up bury their projects instead of transferring ownership to maintainers that are interested in keeping the project alive.
"I checked in weekly to post a track, but no longer considered it in active development."
If you check the site only once a week, why should other users bother?
The site infrastructure is I believe valuable. One can pivot into a different idea using the same infrastructure and simply move on, re-using the code base.
That's a great article. I have made a similar experience, too. However, there's one thing I strongly disagree with. From the article:
> I have no qualms with walking away from projects, as I expect that if the idea is valuable, someone else will be happy to step up and take my place;
Up to here I agree. However, the article continues with:
> it's more likely that several people will step up and the strongest will survive - which is best for everyone.
To my experience, this is the #1 reason why promising projects die (by slowly converting to crap): The maintainer goes away, quietly, leaving everyone in confusion. I always thought this would happen only by accident (previous maintainer overestimates his/her free time). But I'd never have thought anybody would do this on purpose.
It is really minimal effort to drop a quick note about dropping the project and naming a successor.
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