[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Matthias Kuhn]

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 <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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