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Comment by zubspace | Hacker News Reader

Determining if a project is alive or dead really is a problem. And this problem will grow from year to year.

There are so many small and medium sized projects on Github, where you have no idea if they are maintained or not. Sometimes there are projects which are alive and kicking with multiple pull requests, maintainers promising changes or a major release and suddenly nothing. Sometimes smaller projects see no changes for months, but they simply work and don't need maintenance at all. Maybe the community moved elsewhere and and the project will only see bugfixes coming in and no more features?

The burden of figuring this all out lies with the visitor and is a annoying hassle.

I would love if Github could somehow show me on the landing page, if the project is worth investing time in. Maybe they could send a heartbeat to the maintainer and simply show the project as dead as soon as there is no response?

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You said it yourself, this is a very hard problem.

There are Java packages that haven't seen a commit in years and are still perfect for a task. There are npm packages that are 2 months old and terribly outdated and unmaintained.

My personal favorite metric is "time to maintainer response": how long does it take for a maintainer to respond to issues or pull requests. Not necessarily to resolve them, but triage issues or provide guidance on a PR.

If this happens quickly and with reasonable responses, projects are usually solid, assuming they have existed for a while and see decent usage.

In this case, the code is still maintained and at least some pull requests are being processed (I haven't checked in detail). The only thing is that there hasn't been an official release for some time.

> There are Java packages that haven't seen a commit in years and are still perfect for a task.

My favorite is Scriptella (http://scriptella.org/download.html) which recently just got its first update in around 7 years.

For what it does, it just worked, and for many uses cases, updates were never an issue.

Author of Scriptella here. Thank you for mentioning it! The product was neglected for many years, but I never was ready to finally press the kill switch. Hoping that one day I will have more time to work on it...

I cannot promise active feature development, but at least keep it compatible with recent JDK versions. Let me know if you have any feature requests on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scriptella or https://github.com/scriptella/scriptella-etl

I think Scriptella is fantastic. It does one thing extremely well, and for me, that's all I can ask for.

How's this for a metric: number of stars divided by number of open issues.

Who cares if something has not commit for 7 years if almost noone uses it and it has no real issues?

On the other hand, you would hope a popular library with heaps of bugs and issues is receiving lots of maintenance.

These are not great metrics. There are no great metrics.

The official JSON implementation is a good example. It is a mature project. It's used everywhere. If you leave an issue or submit a PR that fixes a typo, the maintainer will flat out delete your comment and tell you to buy his book to educate yourself.

Maybe this behavior is good or maybe it's bad. But maintainers are human and metrics are not going to cleanly pick up how well a project is maintained.

> Maybe they could send a heartbeat to the maintainer and simply show the project as dead as soon as there is no response?

If I could not automate response to that, I'd ignore it.

My employer gets to make bullshit intrusions on my time like that, no way will I waste my life on make-work from Github.

Just fishing for a response wouldn't be very meaningful anyway. A far better metric would be the time it takes for a maintainer to respond to pull requests and other issues.

> My employer gets to make bullshit intrusions on my time like that, no way will I waste my life on make-work from Github.

You are not willing to give Github the information, if a project ,which you uploaded, is still active? But, will you give that information to users asking for details? Which way is more annoying to you and the users?

What I want to say is, that Github will turn into a huge graveyard in the years to come, with projects long forgotten still having a landing page like it's the best thing ever. Do you want every visitor to first contact the maintainer if the thing is still alive? Isn't that a huge waste of time?

In my opinion, Github will have to clean up the mess left behind by unmaintained projects at some point. The sooner they start, the easier it will be.

I think one could get most of the way there by having a bot that: a) Autobuilds the library based on its declared dependency stack. b) Runs a test suite, and reports back breakage.

Anything that sits broken more than (say) a month can safely be considered dead. Super-stable low-level code will continue passing their tests forever, and things dependent on specific API versioning in left_pad will be marked dead quickly...

> The burden of figuring this all out lies with the visitor and is a annoying hassle.

I usually find it to be a much smaller hassle than recreating the functionality myself.

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