I was musing today about how to solve the problem of projects going stale on github
. It really is an annoying problem if you depend on a project where the main maintainers go absent without passing the project on to someone else. The project becomes trapped and dead. Usually (and rightfully), only the maintainers can push releases that can be used by a wider community. But that means if you’re depending on a ruby gem or an npm package or a java jar or any other build artifact on an official channel, you’re out luck because the release artifacts are no longer updated once the maintainers go absent. People can submit pull requests, but with no maintainers to accept them, the source code goes stale too. Though you can grab the pull release(s), the merge process often requires project-specific knowledge that has gone absent with the maintainers.