"David E. Wheeler" <[email protected]> writes:
> A couple times in the last year, people have hit me up to ask about taking
> ownership of abandoned extensions on PGXN. In neither case was I able to
> track down the original owner, not for lack of trying. Then this past week I
> was alerted to potential superuser escalations in two more abandoned
> extensions on PGXN.
Clearly not a good situation.
> So I think it may be time for a policy on this. What do you recommend? I have
> a few thoughts and options, some of which would require additional work on
> PGXN at some point.
> * Set up a committee of some kind to investigate abandoned extensions and
> find vet and find replacement developers when possible.
> * Cease transferring extensions without permission from long-gone developers
> and instead suggest that people fork extensions and give them new names.
> * Add an annotation to apparently abandoned extensions and mark them as such
> on pgxn.org, along with relevant pointers to replacement extensions and
> contact information for the original developer to get in touch and reclaim
> access. Or maybe it goes away if they create a new release.
I think we have to think first of the users' experience. It's not
good if an extension that is abandoned and has known problems looks
the same as actively-maintained ones. So I would prioritize your last
bullet point of somehow annotating seemingly-abandoned extensions.
By the same token, I don't think "fork under a different name" offers
good user experience: what it offers is confusion. So I prefer a
mechanism that allows a new developer to take over an abandoned
extension over one that encourages forking, even if the latter is
supported by a pointer-to-replacement mechanism. For myself, if I'd
stopped maintaining something for lack of time/interest, I'd be very
happy if someone else picked it up; but I do realize that probably
not everyone feels that way. (Probably-impractical idea: when an
extension is first listed on pgxn, ask if it'd be okay to reassign
ownership in the event that development seems dead.)
In any case, I agree that you should have some sort of defined
process for deciding that an extension is abandoned. Whether
that's a committee or just a checklist, I don't have a strong
opinion about. But it should be unsurprising to all concerned
when such a determination is made.
regards, tom lane
