We need a community effort to maintain unmaintained dub packages, suggestions

mw mingwu at gmail.com
Sat May 23 17:27:15 UTC 2020


On Saturday, 23 May 2020 at 10:23:09 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> On Saturday, 23 May 2020 at 02:04:01 UTC, mw wrote:
>> Well, fork and fix is ok for personal project; but for the 
>> company, they will certainly say: why not choose a mature 
>> language with mature libraries? why not just use Java / Python 
>> / C++? why should we spend time fixing the libraries instead 
>> of getting our (functionality) work done?
>
> If the library was in a complete and stable state when original 
> the maintainer left, picking up it's maintenance is not that 
> much of a trouble, assuming you only want to keep it compiling 
> and to fix the most critical bugs. Even for a lone programmer 
> it's worth considering, and more so for a company with many 
> programmers.

This is majority of the case we care about, i.e. fix the bug 
found in well-used unmaintained  packages.


But for industry usage, there is another side of the story, i.e 
accountability & company politics. The managers who can make 
decisions (together with the consequent responsibility) have to 
think about the worst scenario: what if the project missed the 
deadline? or even fail? Will s/he *bet* his/her job security or 
even career on a new language / library? Most managers sure 
won't. That's why companies always want to use *mature* language 
& libraries:

1) the project schedule can be more reliably estimated (without 
wasting extra time, detour to fix libraries bugs)

2) if the project delayed, or failed, at least nobody in the 
company can blame him/her choosed a new language & new libraries 
that caused the failure.




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