[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Paolo Cavallini]

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
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/