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I have a background in user experience design and I only brought this up because it has a lot to do with my way of thinking and I noticed something regarding the staleness of applications, resources, materials, complete abandonment by maintainer for numbers of reasons and we still encounter them time to time. I feel that this issue should be discussed and I used a search engine to no avail.
I used Linux in 2011-2014 with a long pause till recently in 2019-2020 and the difference in resources availability, package search, choices, are vast and amazing, however by time I think we're experiencing the unavoidable: abandoned and stale packages and resources anywhere online both in package repositories and search results with no significant indication that the application is abandoned for 5+ years except for the timestamp, people easily don't notice stuff like this and have more rough experience with their computer especially if people don't routinely read news or find a way to keep their machine up to the date in current age standards.
For now, I'm currently trying to figure out what people feel about this topic especially in this time and year. I would like to confirm with a small Q&A for any users who are willing to answer. You can skip a question if you want, pick any question below for answer or discussion.
* Have you noticed an increase in the stale and abandoned repo in pkg repositories in the past years?
* Do you agree or disagree that there can be better implementation to ward off this issue for overall better user experience for all users?
* Do we need a more efficient system to organize package listing to steer away from completely abandoned repositories with older timestamps like pre-2010 or pre-2015?
* Do you have your own solutions to ward off staleness in your environment? (For instance: usage of date-based filters for search engine, date-based result sorting for a search engine or package listing, date-based filters for repositories)
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Few remarks I have regarding this subject:
- When I use search engines to find articles related to my solution or interest, in recent time I found myself using the search engine filters more frequently to prevent myself from encountering old, expired articles that no longer apply to today. I'm aware there are many wonderful resources that are still relative for this time and age, I only speak for those that are no longer relevant.
- There aren't any obvious signals except the "last updated timestamp." Do we have tools to significate that the repository was abandoned by maintainer for a long period of time, perhaps for a year or more? (There is numbers of reasons for this and we'll encounter them more frequently in close future)
- I noticed there was an increase in stale information online that got abandoned by the original author. Sometimes there isn't much we can do, but we have control over a few things like package repositories. What can we do about these repositories? We have outdated flags, but it's not appropriate for _stale_ packages that were last updated in 2012, abandoned by authors for a number of reasons including unavoidable like mortality. We have fellow developers who are being passed away and maintaining a repo is the last thing to think about in many families. Some don't have any plan for post-mortality, very few services offer you options of what they would do with your data if abandoned for x period of time (approx. a year or two), very few discussions of this topic got brought up.
-I noticed the difficulties in-migration from Python 2 to Python 3 for developers, try to fathom what it is like for the remaining userbase with some of the users routinely trying to keep python2 dependency off their machines. Perhaps there is lesson to be learned from Python 2 to Python 3 migration for other languages. There is some application out that no longer has control by the original maintainer and I'm not sure if we have a real functioning solution to this possible upcoming nightmare and I'd like to be wrong this time.
I hope there will be more discussion and brainstorming if this topic got recognized as a very real thing and a real issue, all suggestions, ideas, changes, toward to the better would be very welcoming. If there is any mistakes in any part of this thread I've written, please correct me, the entire thread is open for thoughts. If you don't have much to say, try my Q&A for a discussion thought. Thanks.
Last edited by White girl (2020-02-19 11:43:40)
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I discovered an attempted solution to a similar use case on GitHub to ward off 'stale' issues that don't have interaction updates for an extended period of time.
https://github.com/probot/stale#is-clos … -good-idea
Is closing stale issues really a good idea?
In an ideal world with infinite resources, there would be no need for this app.
But in any successful software project, there's always more work to do than people to do it. As more and more work piles up, it becomes paralyzing. Just making decisions about what work should and shouldn't get done can exhaust all available resources. In the experience of the maintainers of this app—and the hundreds of other projects and organizations that use it—focusing on issues that are actively affecting humans is an effective method for prioritizing work.
To some, a robot trying to close stale issues may seem inhospitable or offensive to contributors. But the alternative is to disrespect them by setting false expectations and implicitly ignoring their work. This app makes it explicit: if work is not progressing, then it's stale. A comment is all it takes to keep the conversation alive.
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