indigoxela's picture

Posted by indigoxela on Wed, Jun 25, 2025 - 10:26pm

Please use this topic to suggest agenda items for our weekly meetings.

Comments

indigoxela's picture

Wed, Jun 25, 2025 - 10:30pm by indigoxela

How to deal with abandoned projects?

So far, I don't think there has ever been a deprecated, officially unsupported project (module or theme...).
But it's also unclear, what the steps are to achieve that. It's even unclear, if that's possible at all. Very likely help from someone with sufficient permissions on backdropcms.org is necessary.

I think, the approach - or to start with, the policy - should get documented somewhere.

1.4k contrib projects exist on GitHub, and people start to find broken, outdated, unmaintained, obsolete ones, which still show up in the installer. It doesn't seem ideal to leave all those zombies in an installable state (via Project Browser), because that means, site admins have to decide whether somethings safe to install, while they don't see the whole picture (last commit ages ago, open issue with warnings, might break the site worst case...).

The bug squad is a great idea, but not the solution for completely abandoned projects.

As PHP and Backdrop core move on, problems with those "zombies" will increase. At least, that's what I assume.

Thu, Jun 26, 2025 - 6:31am by izmeez

This may be somewhat difficult to address for various reasons.

Some projects may look abandoned to someone new looking at it and yet may show a number of installs. The number of installs may not indicate it is actually being used, or it may indicate use on old sites that are still present and becoming unmaintained themselves.

So what is the goal:

  1. Alert new users that the project is unmaintained, dwindling in support, not necessarily a good choice, needs a new maintainer.
  2. Alert existing sites where the module may be installed that it has become stale and they should review their use of it.
  3. Marking projects as deprecated and work towards removing them.
  4. Have a rotting tomato scale?

There may be more goals.

indigoxela's picture

Thu, Jun 26, 2025 - 7:00am by indigoxela

So what is the goal

The primary goal is clarity: what happens / has to happen if... ;-)

Currently, for example, I couldn't even deprecate my own projects, they will still show up in all project installers. And there's nothing I could do about it.

The other thing is: what happens with projects that are definitely unmaintained, and nobody wants to take over, and the project's already  known to break sites only by installing (an extreme example, of course, but that can and will happen at some point, as PHP moves on).

Is it even (technically) possible to prevent such a rotten tomato from showing up in the installer? Be it, because a maintainer wants it, or because it's clear, that tomato will never get fresh again, as several attempts to fix the problems failed (example: a module that depends on a 3rd party service that has passed away).

There are probably several situations, where a defined way to sunset a project - clearly documented - is beneficial. Currently I don't think, there is a way.