[TYPO3-english] Outdated / abandoned extensions in TER
Xavier Perseguers
xavier at typo3.org
Tue Mar 4 11:42:19 CET 2014
Dear TYPO3 users and developers,
This post is to gather some feedback from the community.
As you know, the TYPO3 extension repository (TER) contains many outdated
or abandoned extensions. Marking them as such is long running task (not
technically complicated but that's another story).
Now, from time to time (I just did it this morning with EXT:lz_links)
someone picks up an abandoned extension (last update in 2004, no bug
tracker, no public repository, it did not really exist back then), fork
it on GitHub, fix it and then tweet about it.
This is great for users being aware of it but this is not a good
solution, naturally.
Now, it is known that in case of abandoned extensions, someone can try
to contact the author to get the extension key being transfer and become
a new maintainer. If there is no answer for some time, the ECT
(Extension Coordination Team), with dedicated mailing list and project
on Forge, has the privilege to actually transfer the extension key.
However, this is often not really wished to become the new maintainer
when you were just sponsored (or did it for fun) to "fix it". At the
same time, the open-source spirit would be to publish it so that others
may benefit from your work and the TER is the place to put it back.
Transferring an abandoned extension to the Core account is not desired,
as the active contributor team does not have the resources to maintain
all those extensions.
What would you think of setting up an account as owner for abandoned
stuff? If someone has an update, we could have some simple reviews on a
mailing list and then a new version could be uploaded as a service to
the public with no responsibility to maintain it further.
This would have the nice side effect of clearly showing the abandoned
state in TER while allowing someone/some group to pick it up and take
care of it again.
What do you think?
--
Xavier Perseguers
TYPO3 CMS Team Member
TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: http://typo3.org
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