[Slackbuilds-users] Author Inactivity Threshold Question Regarding Takeovers

[Jeremy Hansen]

BLUF: Is there an inactivity threshold for a maintainer before their
SlackBuilds are able to be overtaken by a new maintainer?

---

I am on a several month long business trip and wanted to allow RDP access
to my home system. Upon searching what options are out there, I found xrdp
was pretty highly recommended. However, I found the version on SBo hadn't
been updated in almost 5 years.

I was in a hurry to get this up and running (procrastination at its
finest), so I did what I needed locally to build and install modern
versions of xrdp (and xorgxrdp) since the versions on SBo have
vulnerabilities addressed by future versions.

Normally, I'd reach out to the maintainer and see if they're willing to let
me take over maintenance, however, I was in a rush to get out the door and
didn't think much about it until today (12 days later). I can still reach
out to Phillip Warner, the maintainer for both these packages, however, his
last update on SBo was in April of 2020 (and not even for either of these
packages).

For packages that have maintainers who have been inactive on SBo for a
large period of time (personally, I'm thinking at least a year, if not
more), can current maintainers take over without needing to go through the
process of requesting a takeover from the current author, hoping they
respond in a week or so, and if they don't, request takeover permission on
this list?

Personally, I think 1 year of inactivity of the author is reasonable,
however, I do realize we have more than half the maintainers only
maintaining a single script, and some of those programs might have years
between their releases, which their maintainer is tracking.

I'm curious if there is a threshold of inactivity of an author where SBo
admins consider an author to have orphaned their scripts, or should new
potential takeovers *always* reach out to the original maintainers to see
their current status?

This specific email was due to realizing the xrdp maintainer has been
inactive for 5.5 years and thinking it was reasonable for me to just take
over the scripts, but I figured this might be something the admins might
want to weigh in on if they have a specific threshold in mind.

Jeremy (aka bassmadrigal)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.slackbuilds.org/pipermail/slackbuilds-users/attachments/20251129/ed871b7e/attachment.htm>