[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Nyall Dawson]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 00:57, Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:
>
> 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 This would make me think it's unreliable, outdated and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.

I think this actually IS the intention here.

But, as you've pointed out, no activity =/= unmaintained, as sometimes
no activity just means bug free and feature complete. In this case I
think it's fine to require developers to respond to a quick "is this
still maintained" survey in order to avoid the flag.

Nyall



>
> 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
>
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