Ask HN: What's the best way to relinquish control of an open source project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best way to relinquish control of an open source project?

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I created the original repo of a popular Web Audio plugin but I have admittedly been less than stellar about maintaining it; many unmerged pull requests have piled up and issues have been opened without response. I feel awful about letting down the community like this. My repo has been forked many times, but people often run into my original repo instead of the forks.

What should I do? How can I communicate to the community that I want to relinquish control? Should I just add a note to the README directing users to a better-maintained "official" fork? How should I decide which to pick? Or do I just do nothing and let devs sort it all out?

Any advice is welcome. Thanks.

The ideal scenario is that all the active development and community has moved to some other fork; in that case, just put a big notice at the top of your README saying your repo is deprecated, with a pointer to the new central repo.

However, the usual case is that there's a dozen forks, all with one extra change or fix, all equally stale since their authors happened to fix their particular itch. Perhaps you could contact each of them (or at least, the biggest and most popular ones) and see if any were willing to be nominated Official Maintainer. If there's exactly one, they win. If there's more than one, put them in contact with one another and let them sort it out (much better than having them find one another by accident and letting them fight it out later). If there's zero volunteers, I guess you just have to post an 'abandoned' notice with no forwarding address.

Add people who contributed good pull requests to the project and tell them they can commit to it directly.

Hopefully one (or more) of them will become maintainers (i.e. committing other people's PRs).

Something like Rubinius policy for checkins (http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2006/12/rubinius-serial-intervie...)

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