Stale Fedora Hosted Projects (revisited)

[Brett Lentz]

On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 16:53 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> 
> > Mike McGrath wrote:
> > > Getting back to this.  What should we do with code to which no one claims
> > > ownership or the owner cannot be found?
> > >
> >
> > Has something like an AWOL procedure been considered?
> >
> 
> Not really, thats kind of what I'm probing about.  People didn't like the
> 6 month rule so I'm fine getting rid of that.  But someone needs to be
> accountable for the code itself at all times and I'm hoping to have some
> policy in place that clearly states it.
> 
> 	-Mike


I'd prefer to not see orphaned projects go away completely, if there is
some way to keep them around in a stripped down, minimalist format.

The process I'd like to see would be:

1. Do the usual 6 month project no-activity process.
2. If there is no response in N days, or mail to the project admin
bounces in a fatal way (i.e. "no such user" vs. "mailbox full"), we call
out to the general fedora-devel community to see if anyone wants to
adopt the project and become its new maintainer.
3. If no new maintainer is found, we would then migrate the project to a
central repository for orphaned projects.

The central repository would contain a bare minimum of the project's
files:

* a tar.bz2 of the last revision of all files, with no revision history.
* an archive of any documentation, such as the trac wiki pages. (again,
just the text, with no need to preserve revision history)

This way, we can preserve a stripped down version of the project's files
for a (hopefully) lower infrastructure cost.

Would something like this be possible/desired?

---Brett.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
		-- Abraham Lincoln