[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Paolo Cavallini]

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 <cavallini at faunalia.it
> <mailto:cavallini at faunalia.it>> 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/
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-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/