[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi Matthias,

On 03/02/19 10:17, Matthias Kuhn wrote:

> Marking a plugin as "unmaintained" or "deprecated" is a heavy action which may discourage developers and make even useful plugins disappear.

deprecated yes, unmaintained not necessarily. We could just let the user
know, perhaps suggesting a way to solve this, without removing them for
the list of available plugins (just like the Featured tag).

> 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.

agreed. maybe 3 months would be enough.

> 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.

unfortunately it seems that our users are not very interested in rating
the plugins.

> 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.

sure, thanks for your thoughts. the sheer number of plugins makes the
issue very delicate; we cannot think of managing 1k plugiins by hand, we
need more automatic approaches.

all the best.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/