[QGIS-Developer] Find unmaintained plugins

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi all,

On 04/02/19 15:25, Tim Sutton wrote:

>> On 04 Feb 2019, at 00:30, Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com
>> <mailto:nyall.dawson at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 00:57, Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch
>> <mailto:matthias at opengis.ch>> wrote:

>>> 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 This would make me think it's unreliable, outdated and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.

yes, thanks for making this point more clear

> And sometimes even if the plugin is unmaintained it is still useful to
> lots of people (even if it has a few known bugs)…..
> 
> I’m not sure if flagging plugins as unmaintained is always so nice.. I
> would favour an approach where we could just list plugins in the plugin
> manager based on the date of their last release, most recent first so
> that you can see old versus new

this also makes sense, even though there are plugins that are updated
very frequently without this meaning they are especially useful

> Definitely -1 here on removing plugins that are orphaned unless they are
> part of a security / data integrity risk. Many people may have built up
> specific workflows around the existence of a particular plugin or two
> and there is no need to break this for people even if the plugin is
> orphaned…

agreed

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