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Ask HN: When is a project considered unmaintained and/or abandoned?

by psion on 12/3/18, 4:11 PM with 1 comments

While working on a side-project in Go, I was apt to find plenty of packages and projects that had a year or more on the last modified on GitHub. In my professional world of PHP, I have a tendency to find another package that does the same thing if one is six months old. So my question, as the title says, when should we consider a project unmaintained or abandoned?

  • by pensatoio on 12/4/18, 8:57 AM

    This sounds almost like a trick question.

    The answer is in the definition of unmaintained. When bug reports and merge requests aren’t being addressed, it’s time to pick a different library.

    I think the shift towards using more and smaller libraries exasperates the problem. Personally, I try to avoid using a library unless it has a stable community (multiple people actively contributing, bug reports are being addressed, possibly a roadmap) and provides a significant amount of value I couldn’t create myself within a reasonable amount of time. Value takes the form of: does X faster, is well tested, has a large enough audience for edge cases to be documented.

    *I used “library” as a substitute for “project”