Project status statement

Description

Here's some pain point that has been nagging me for quite a while, esp. when using GitHub and its wealth of software, but it equally applies to GitLab.

It would be very convenient as a maintainer to be able to state and display such an information clearly visible in a highlighted, consistent, dedicated area.

Proposal

A maintainer should be able to state and display an information about the project status clearly visible in a highlighted, consistent, dedicated area, close to the project name and description. This information may need to be visible or repeated in various areas, notably when listing or creating issues or MRs, depending on the following semantics.

  • The project is declared "abandoned": no further work will be done. The project is practically considered read-only and exists only as an archive. A dedicated user should fork the project and assume maintenance on its own.
  • The project is declared "deprecated": one or more alternatives are available at a known place, and directly linked to in the displayed alert. Example: https://github.com/yosssi/gold -> https://github.com/yosssi/ace
  • The project is declared "gliding": no further active work will be done. Example: https://github.com/yorickpeterse/oga
    • PR may/may not be welcome, and may or may not be processed.
    • Issues may/may not be answered to.
    • Critical issues may/may not be fixed.
  • The project is declared "looking for maintainership": Example: https://github.com/lloeki/ex-mode This may be combined with "gliding", "deprecated", or "abandoned".

Such a communication feature would go a long way in enhancing trust in the liveliness of a project. Without such a tool we have to resort to various tactics and proxy metrics such as recent activity, exploring existing forks, or crawling nam/rubygems/etc for various pieces of information to build some heuristic about which one is authoritative.

Having a project being "archived" is tied but orthogonal to this feature: one may want a project to keep being visible because of its importance, making it easier to find the displayed a statement about which of its forks is the new authoritative project. An "archived" project, though, seems to be "abandoned" by definition.

Links / references

Documentation blurb

Overview

What is it? Why should someone use this feature? What is the underlying (business) problem? How do you use this feature?

Use cases

As a library user, when browsing a project, it's sometimes hard to tell which one is the authoritative source, or if the author is actively maintaining the thing.

Conversely, as a maintainer, sometimes you are still maintaining a project to various degrees but maybe you are looking for a new maintainer. Alternatively sometimes you completely deprecate or abandon a project, or even vet a specific fork as a heir. While as a maintainer it is possible to make a statement or point people to a new location in various hackish, haphazard places, people overlook such information more often than not, and we maintainers cannot blame them as it's lost in a sea of README/CONTRIBUTING text or in an issue/PR/MR template.

Feature checklist

Make sure these are completed before closing the issue, with a link to the relevant commit.