Hacker News Reader

Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

What about an email saying something like

Looks like you haven't been very active on project <foo> lately, <bar>. Would you like to hand your baby over to <baz> or <quux> perhaps?

where baz and quux are people who have been ranked as being most active in the given repo.

EDIT: With a click here to hand over your repo to someone else (and lift that heavy burden off your shoulder), obviously.

View on HN

How about a system that ranks the "popularity" and activity on all the forks, and simply lists/suggests these forks when a repository is considered inactive? The community will figure it out ("this fork is the suggested source"), and no action is required on behalf of the owner of the original repository.

There's no call to action. Someone (including myself) will open the email, realize there's no immediate call to action and be like, "Ya I'll get to that" and nothing will ever happen.

Also, without something like the proposed citizenship with karma points and such, there's no good way for an automated system to suggest someone to turn it over to .

Why it has to be automated? What's wrong with actually having some mailing list or other community forum and discussing it there would could be the consensus maintainer?

If it's not automated, it requires to much additional effort. It is worth to do for really big projects which can't be developed without community effort, but not for smaller ones which almost work and only require small fixes from time to time.

Also on such projects people don't know each other, and don't know how much everyone have contributed, so there's no way to have meaningful discussion and consensus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com