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

[Dukc]

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 because regressions due to library development is the 
main way the library can break code using it. If the development 
stops, so do the regressions, and code using it tends to keep 
working. The only problems left are:
1. breakage due to language updates
2. old bugs that the user has not happened to trigger.

Point one is much less work than dealing with regressions, and 
point two can usually be worked around, if fixing the library is 
too hard: You didn't trigger the feature before, so you can 
usually continue to avoid the usage that triggers the bug.