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Comment by TimCinel | Hacker News Reader

Gulp. I'm guilty of this. An iOS component I shared became quite popular.

Now I don't even do iOS development anymore, Xcode is out of date, I haven't even used ARC. Whenever people poke me, saying that the issues and PRs are piling up, I tell them my situation and ask what they suggest I do. Surprisingly, my responses get no response.

Perhaps I should just add some of the past contributors to the commit access list.

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I kind of wish that on Github, there was a default "untested" branch bit that defaulted to on.

On the back end, this would aggregate all the commits applied from a head, and allow the maintainer and contributors to know beforehand if their stuff applied cleanly.

Eventually, if the project is abandoned, this untested "uberpatch" would end up being the defacto main branch.

There are probably very many horrible problems with this idea...

Sounds like a security disaster, for one. I could submit a rootkit to every project on github.

Have you considered making it clear that it's not maintained anymore? Add [not maintained] to the repo description or something.

A similar thing happened to me with youtube-dl. I handed the project over and gave commit access to a couple of contributors who are now doing an excellent job at keeping the program up to date.

Not long ago, this story was discussed here and makes a similar recommendation:

http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html

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