[Slackbuilds-users] Orphaning my SlackBuilds

[B. Watson]

On Sun, 1 Sep 2024, Jeremy Hansen wrote:

> I would love to see a change like this on SBo for known unmaintained
> scripts. It would be immediately obvious what scripts are considered
> unmaintained. They can remain that way until they no longer build
> and are removed or they are taken over by someone else.

We have this already. See:

https://slackbuilds.org/advsearch.php?stype=maint&q=orphaned

The trouble is, we don't have an automated process for marking scripts
as unmaintained. Someone abandons their builds, we leave them as-is
and let others take them over... and then years later, the ones that
didn't get taken over, still have the old maintainer info on them.

Having the old maintainer send one last update with MAINTAINER="orphaned"
is nice, but in all our years of operation, no maintainer has ever done
this when leaving (though it sounds like Dominik Drobek is going to; thanks,
Dominik!).

In theory, some SBo admin should mark them as orphaned... but as long
as it depends on humans to remember to do it, it'll remain undone. I
have no idea how to really automate it, though.

We have builds that haven't been updated in years because they haven't
needed updates: "mature" or abandoned upstream, but still useful, or
still entertaining if it's a game... so we can't just say something
simple like "any build that hasn't been touched in N years becomes
orphaned".