What to do about stale or abandoned dub packages?

[ShadoLight]

On Tuesday, 18 February 2020 at 14:24:29 UTC, Petar Kirov 
[ZombineDev] wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 February 2020 at 12:44:28 UTC, ShadoLight wrote:
>> [..]
>
> Hi, I don't have time for a detailed answer right now, but I 
> think the best course of action would be to adopt projects like 
> this in the dlang-community organization. See this blog post 
> for more details:
>
> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/02/17/project-highlight-the-d-community-hub/

This definitely has the makings of a solution. Not yet perfect, 
but I can see that something along these lines can work.

I remember seeing this at the time, but have completely forgotten 
about it. I suspect it is also driven more from Seb's/your side, 
than from the community's side at this stage, no? I suspect it 
needs to be easy and a "standardized" dub process so that it is 
rather initiated from the community's side.

>
> TL;DR
> The project author doesn't need to transfer the ownership, but 
> it's best if he does so, so users of the project have a clear 
> indication of the official/upstream line of work.
>
> The project author keeps maintainership access to the project, 
> but also shares this access with other members of the 
> community, so they can merge bug fix pull requests and release 
> new versions of the software.

I completely agree with the listed benefits but, even though the 
process is superficially clear (nominate a project or just "ask 
for help"), it is not clear to me how it will work in practice. 
For example, I suspect a common case is going to be when the 
author disappears. How will pull-request merging be handled in 
this case?

Somehow there needs to be a way to identify the projects that 
needs TLC, and for a way for a champion to volunteer. Preferably 
from the dub pages itself.

Maybe it will help if the dub 'list view'[1] contain an extra 
column for build status (if being done). Some statistics about 
the last compiler version/date that was build successfully could 
also be useful to help people see the status at a glance.

And then some way for someone to easily volunteer to take over a 
project as maintainer. It will be useful if this can be easily 
done from the dub page itself, preferably allowed/disallowed 
based on some criteria based on the above.

Maybe it could also be useful for the 'volunteer action' to 
automatically generate a forum post where the "offer" is 
proposed, and for people (and/or the author) to comment. Then 
Seb, you or someone can, based on the feedback, add the volunteer 
to dlang-community and he/she can fork the original repo to 
dlang-community.

I notice there is a 'harbored-mod' repo there... maybe we can use 
that as a standard naming convention eg. <package_name>-mod is 
the standard name if the original project is left in dub.

Displaying the build status for search results will also at a 
glance show that <package_name>-mod is building, while 
<package_name> is not (or indicate it is not being auto-build).

Just throwing some ideas around here...

[1] https://code.dlang.org/?category=library