Yes, I certainly could. This comment chain started with "why is stale a bad thing". It's bad because I have to do that.
There might be a maintained fork/separate project that does what I want that I would like to find instead. Or maybe I was just searching to save myself 30 minutes on a one time task and I'm not up for adopting an abandoned project.
You can understand the other side too. Let's say you are looking for a project that fits your needs and you narrowed it down to a few choices with similar functionality and notice that one of them wasn't updated in a while. Is it wrong to ask if the project is still active in such case to decide it further?
It's always possible to revisit a decades-old project and pick up where you left off. If you don't have the time or motivation to finish it today, you can hardly blame your past self for making the same decision.
Leaving your abandoned project in a somewhat "working state" can go a long way to facilitate this.
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.
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.
Indeed. I made a project a few years ago and maintained it for several years. At one point I just didn't have the time (or motivation, I suppose) to continue updates and essentially abandoned it without much official word, while putting in a good amount of work every few months. The guilt was pretty crushing, so I can understand where the author comes from.
Fortunately, someone offered to take it up recently so I feel much better now.
Yes, but it’s done on a project basis. Kill the project, move the good people to a new project, release the others. Later, resume/restart the project.
It’s really hard to be surgical about this because who wants to be the good engineer that has to pick up the barely functioning pieces of code left behind. Who wants to reward a solid engineer with a big refactor job on an already late/failing project? The optics aren’t great. I’m not saying it never works, but as a general rule, deferring the project is often a better option.
I disagree with the premise that a project is "abandoned" unless it has very recent commits to master. We are living in a weird world if that's the case.
I would hope so. Then you don't have to work on the project anymore and you can move on to something else. OR you could take their source code and modify it and make it even better!
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.
's not my doing, it's just an older project that's slowly migrating to a newer system but is held back by everyone having lives. I wouldn't do it normally, heh.
There might be a maintained fork/separate project that does what I want that I would like to find instead. Or maybe I was just searching to save myself 30 minutes on a one time task and I'm not up for adopting an abandoned project.
reply