[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi Paolo

On 2/3/19 1:39 PM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> 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).

Then I misunderstood the goal of this proposal, sorry.

I was imagining myself looking through a plugin list of a software of
which I am an ordinary user and seeing a plugin tagged as
"unmaintained". This would make me think it's unreliable, outdated and
unstable and hence not recommended.

What signal do you think this label should send to a user?

> 
>> 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.
> 

Bests