What to do about stale or abandoned dub packages?

[ShadoLight]

On Tuesday, 18 February 2020 at 13:02:37 UTC, rikki cattermole 
wrote:
> On 19/02/2020 1:54 AM, ShadoLight wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 18 February 2020 at 12:48:58 UTC, rikki cattermole 
>> wrote:
>>> 1) We can allow others to take ownership of packages in cases 
>>> like dlangui (manual process and requires getting the right 
>>> people to agree)
>> 
>> Can you elaborate? Does this requires getting agreement from 
>> the original author? How will this work when the person has 
>> disappeared?
>
> I think in the earlier days of dub one or two packages may have 
> been deregistered or something along those lines.
> But since you can just register your fork under a slightly 
> different name, its not a big deal.
>
> That is as much as I should say, best for somebody who does 
> have access to say if they are willing to do it.
>

OK, understood. Yes, that definitely helps. I also looked on dub 
and, as you noticed, there were none.

But even if there is, it is not always clear which one to use.


>>> 2) dlangui has no active forks. As per 
>>> http://code.dlang.org/search?q=dlangui
>> 
>> Not forked on http://code.dlang.org/. Forked on github i.e. 
>> https://github.com/buggins/dlangui/network/members
>
> Unless it is registered on code.dlang.org, the repository owner 
> probably doesn't intend on you using it.
>

This is the problem with the current status-quo. There is no 
procedure in dub in support of this idea so, I suspect, people 
don't do it because 'it is not done'.

In my case [1] I asked why a specific feature didn't work, 
someone answered explaining it was incomplete with code showing 
how he added the code to the package, which I then used and 
further generalized. All these improvements could be useful to 
other people, but to who do we do the pull-requests since the 
original is abandoned?

Maybe someone is maintaining his own version and would in fact be 
willing, but are afraid of license issues, etc. If dub has an 
official way to do this, would this not be useful?

For example, dlangui statistics today are:

         4 downloads today
         44 downloads this week
         184 downloads this month
         31438 downloads total

30k+ total downloads. If is still being downloaded over 40x this 
week, even though it is clearly shown as failing to build. This 
is surely an indication of at least perceived/expected usefulness 
- and surely it would be better to have an official way to use 
the most up-to-date package, if at all possible.


> Keep in mind that people fork on Github for a number of reasons 
> including just keeping track of interesting repositories. That 
> fork number is not a good metric of potential developers who 
> could maintain it.

Yes, but you don't need many, you just need *one* that is willing.


[1] 
https://forum.dlang.org/post/wcpraclpsdmqvclzqzfa@forum.dlang.org