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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Or to put it another way:

As an open source maintainer, you're perfectly entitled to just walk away. Hit that archive button on github so nothing new can come from the repo, and enjoy your life. Nobody could fault on you that. People would prefer you work out a clean transition to a new maintainer, but you have no obligation to do so.

Deleting the repos is the equivalent of setting the house on fire on the way out (especially when they're under their own org). Unlike in reality, it turns out it's totally permitted, but people will still view it as a dick move.

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The repo has not been deleted! https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web

From the bottom of the postmortem repo:

> At the moment I am planing to make repos private and then delete them (will remove benchmarks as well), unless others suggest better ideas.

so it's not deleted. it's the last call for all the people that wanted to profit from his work to take up the mantle and drive the project

something anyone can do right now, I would add

but people just prefer directing the guy work

I don't see why.

Anyone that cared already has their local repository copy.

After all that is what DVCS are all about

Issues and pull requests are often useful documentation (for open source projects, sometimes the only documentation), links to files and lines of code are now broken.

That is what happens when one outsources everything to Github.

This would have happened identically even if the project had its own hosting, so outsourcing hosting to GitHub isn't a factor in this case.

Lkml doesn't seem to have this problem, and they are the original git users.

So all you need to do is get popular and important enough that several unrelated third parties will mirror and host your communications for you.

Or... publish everything as essentially a log in an openly accessible manner (ie. email as a on a list serv with it's web accessible archive), and places like archive.org will happily squirrel it away for you.

I wouldn't happen if instead of git, they used fossil.

It seems like the only "Fossilhub" is this: http://chiselapp.com/

I would guess that it would make it very hard to create a community around the project.

Fossil has everything built in including fully functioning web interface (in contrast to git).

If you want to rely on some code that it takes even a second of your day to think about your response to author deleting that public code, then you fork it and simply track author's repo.

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