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Comment by joshwa | Hacker News Reader

Why not look for someone to take over as maintainer? I'm sure an appropriate person in the community would step forward.

This is the traditional method in most open-source communities... particularly where there are canonical distribution sources such as the rubyforge gems.

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I don't believe that's effective, especially for projects like Net::SSH and Capistrano where the hacker-to-user ratio is so low. If someone wants to step forward and maintain Capistrano, they'll do so, and the community will organize around them because they'll show they have the passion to do it. If no one steps forward, then an appointment would have failed anyway, because obviously no one has the necessary passion to maintain it, and it might be better for it to die and make way for other alternatives. Either way, appointing a successor would be futile.

Even if no one steps forward, would that be so bad? Capistrano works perfectly well for the vast majority of folks. It's not like I'm leaving behind a legacy of mostly-broken software. :)

i don't think it's as much an issue of organizing around that new person as it is organizing around the new home for the software, regardless of who is maintaining it.

if i want to update my installed version of net::ssh, can i go to the project's homepage and download a new version or do i have to look through a dozen forks on github to find out which one looks to be the most maintained and hasn't broken anything?

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