Brane Dump: "Is This Project Still Maintained?"
If you wander around a lot of open source repositories on the likes of GitHub, you’ll invariably stumble over repos that have an issue (or more than one!) with a title like the above. Sometimes sitting open and unloved, often with a comment or two from the maintainer and a bunch of “I’ll help out!” followups that never seemed to pan out. Very rarely, you’ll find one that has been closed, with a happy ending.
These issues always fascinate me, because they say a lot about what it means to “maintain” an open source project, the nature of succession (particularly in a post-Jia Tan world), and the expectations of users and the impedence mismatch between maintainers, contributors, and users. I’ve also recently been thinking about pre-empting this sort of issue, and opening my own issue that answers the question before it’s even asked.
As both a producer and consumer of open source software, I completely understand the reasons someone might want to know whether a project is abandoned. It’s comforting to be able to believe that there’s someone “on the other end of the line”, and that if you have a problem, you can ask for help with a non-zero chance of someone answering you. There’s also a better chance that, if the maintainer is still interested in the software, that compatibility issues and at least show-stopper bugs might get fixed for you.
