Hi all, Marking a plugin as "unmaintained" or "deprecated" is a heavy action which may discourage developers and make even useful plugins disappear.
Thus if this is done in any way, I am in favor of sending several reminders to a plugin author over a time period of at least 6 months before taking any action. It then needs to be super easy for a plugin maintainer to remove this status from their plugins. Maybe alternative approaches could also be considered to move maintained plugins to the top and make stars / votings more relevant. Or have the possibility to flag a plugin as unmaintained (like stackoverflows "needs moderator attention") where it's required to post a link to an issue which has not received an answer in a long time. There are various variables which need to be balanced in this discussion like losing useful plugins, adding maintenance burden (to plugin developers and plugin maintainers), having a credible plugin ecosystem. Let's make sure we keep all of them in mind. Thank you Matthias On 2/2/19 8:30 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote: > Thanks for your offer of help. I agree that the mail should be sent only > for plugins not updated in the last (3? 6? 9?) months. > Could you please start filling up a ticket on > https://issues.qgis.org/issues > so we can define specs resulting from this thread and start implementing it? > Cheers. > > On 01/02/19 22:40, Thomas Baumann wrote: > > Hi Paolo, > > > > sounds like a good idea to send a reminder once a year to the maintainer > > and mark plugins as unmaintained if no feedback is received. > > > > I am available to help implementing it. > > > > Regards, > > Thomas > > > > > > Am Fr., 1. Feb. 2019, 19:01 hat Paolo Cavallini <[email protected] > > <mailto:[email protected]>> geschrieben: > > > > Hi Thomas, > > > > On 01/02/19 13:53, Thomas Baumann wrote: > > > > > I made the experience that there are QGIS-plugins which are not > > > maintained anymore. > > > Example: > > > > > > >http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/QGIS-Developer-Rectangles-Ovals-Digitizing-plugin-deprecated-td5366686.html > > > > > > Recently I asked some maintainers if they have plans to update their > > > plugins to be QGIS3-ready because I was willing to update them if the > > > maintainer wouldn't do it... but again I got the impression that some > > > plugins are not maintained anymore. > > > Example: > > > https://github.com/NathanW2/selection-sets/issues/5 > > > > > > Now that there is the change from QGIS2 to QGIS3 some unmaintained > > > plugins will just dissapear like through a "natural selection". But in > > > one or two years there could again be lots of unmaintained plugins > > which > > > could have bugs that slow down qgis or make them unstable like it > > > happened with the Rectangles-Ovals-Digitizing-plugin ( > > > https://github.com/vinayan/RectOvalDigitPlugin/issues/6 ). > > > > > > Wouldn't it make sense to check once a year if all plugins are still > > > maintained? > > > > > > You could for example use something like LimeSurvey ( > > > https://www.limesurvey.org/community ) and ask every maintainer to > > > respond if they still feel responsible for the plugin. In the > > backend of > > > Limesurvey you have a database with the responses so it should be > > quite > > > easy to automatically synchronize the results with your > > repository-items. > > > This way the unmaintained plugins could be marked as deprecated if no > > > response is sent back. > > > > thanks a lot for your suggestion. I agree that the move to QGIS 3 > > automatically purges old unmaintained code, but this does not solve > > entirely the issue. > > In short do you suggest we should run a survey once a year, sending it > > to the list of plugin maintainers, and marking as deprecated all plugins > > for which we do not receive a positive response? > > I would be a bit skeptical, as many plugins are still useful even if not > > actively maintained. An alternative would be to add to our Django app an > > automatic reminder to be sent to maintainer, asking to confirm they > > maintenance; in absence of a feedback, we could mark it as unmaintained, > > and make this visible to users, so they have the options of adopting it, > > supporting it, or stopping using it before it actually stops working. > > How does it sound? in case you agree on this or a modified version of > > it, would you be available to help implementing this? > > All the best. > > -- > > Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu <http://www.faunalia.eu> > > QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> Chair: > > http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/ > > _______________________________________________ > > QGIS-Developer mailing list > > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > > List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer > > > _______________________________________________ QGIS-Developer mailing list [email protected] List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
