what to do with abandoned projects? (suggestion: display some indicator)
I'm not entirely sure if this is the issue tracker for my request. I'd be happy to move this to a more appropriate place.
the problem
I don't mean to mock any of the developers. I have stopped developing things myself for one reason or another. This is about the broader question: what should be done with projects that are no longer maintained?
I think F-Droid should have some kind of warning badge for old/abandoned projects. I was looking through various camera apps, and (among others, of course) these came up:
- QuickSnap (last release: 2013) https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.lightbox.android.camera/
- Focal (last release: 2014) https://f-droid.org/de/packages/fr.xplod.focal/
- AICamera (last release: 2019, looks like a one-off build with no actual intention of further development) https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.lun.chin.aicamera/
- SimpleCamera (abandoned in 2021) https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.simplemobiletools.camera/
While they probably all worked, the chances of them being great candidates today are pretty slim.
where should this info come from?
So here would be various ways that could be taken as an indicator:
- releases within the past two years (or so, I'd also be fine with three or four years)
- commit activity on the underlying repository
- manually marking things (like SimpleCamera above, where the developers were kind enough to add it to the description! But this could also be a formalized field of metadata in the metadata repository!). A field in the metadata repository would have the benefit that I could now create a merge request for the above four apps.
- The app's manifest file and/or build information, minSdkVersion, targetSdkVersion, compileSdkVersion. Someone targeting Android 5 might not have updated their app in a while.
- GitHub's "archive repository" feature (that yellow ribbon at the top like of a project)
where would this info go?
I would like to propose having some kind of UI element on the website and in the F-Droid app that would make it easier to identify apps like these.
- One possibility would be to add some kind of badge for these apps.
- Another possibility would be to feature the inverse, like "updated in the past 12 months" or so.
- Finally, this could simply be interpreted as an undesireable feature (like promoting an external service; with the upside of this being already a thing F-Droid does today).