More than anything, GitHub projects need a big “active/not active” sign | Hacker News Reader

More than anything, GitHub projects need a big “active/not active” sign

16 pointshoodoof11 comments

There needs to be a blindlingly obvious statement on each github repo that declares, in the opinion of the repository owner, if this project is active or not.

The comments so far are saying that there are a number of methods to infer if a project is ACTUALLY active. Indeed there are.

I'm talking about something different though - a statement from the project owner about whether or not they deem it to be active. Important difference.

View on HN

If they do this, they'll need a third option: "Done".

There's a big difference between a project that's not seeing contributions because the author lost interest halfway through, and a project that is feature complete and was built sanely so that it doesn't need any ongoing attention.

Pretty much everything I have up on Github (and elsewhere) falls into that "Done" category. And I get emails several times a year asking if various libraries have been "abandoned".

Good idea.

There really is a need to know where a given project is at.

A repository administrator able and willing to switch its tag to "inactive" can just edit the readme to start with "this project is inactive/abandoned/etc."

B2 was once an inactive blog project until someone forked it and called it Wordpress.

See a project you like? Fork it and email the authors if they want to work with you on it. Be proactive and assertive.

Looking at the last commit or issue tracker usually makes it obvious. I also don't think repo owners will go and update all repos based on activeness or not manually.

OR an "Active X days ago" message somewhere near the name. Where activity can mean a closed Issue / Comment by a contributor or a commit. Will save some research time.

P.S.: Weekend Hack : Build a Chrome extension for the same.

You could just look at the graphs section.

The only people I see complain about this sort of thing are people that just want to leech off others' work without contributing back.

Have you ever forked a repo then made a pull request to later find out the owner wants nothing to do with the project anymore? Your point may be valid for many users but it's not okay to discredit the op's idea.

No, I haven't. I don't make a pull request if the project is obviously abandoned, which is trivial to find out: it shows the dates of the most recent updates to each file/directory in the root of the project, you can see the timestamps of the most recent 20ish commits with one click on Github, etc.

If you want to use some open source project, is it not of primary concern to you whether or not the project is active and maintained?

And besides, what is wrong with using open source and not giving back? Or is "giving back" some requirement that you made up that you feel people must follow?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com