Ask HN: A project isn't dead just because it's quiet – how to tell people that?

8 points by fernvenue 306 days ago | 6 comments

Recently, I noticed that one of my personal projects was mentioned in a blog post—but only mentioned. The author skipped actually trying it, simply because it "hasn’t been updated in a while." The thing is, I’m quite confident my project would’ve worked just fine for their use case.

This made me wonder: I haven't updated it not because it's abandoned, but because there's nothing that really needs changing. It's stable and does what it's supposed to do.

I’ve had similar experiences before—when recommending a GitHub repo to someone, if they see it hasn’t been updated in months, their first question is usually: “Is this still working?” I then have to explain that yes, it still works.

Even large projects face this problem. If a popular repo goes a few months without commits, someone will inevitably open an issue asking: “Is this project still maintained?”

So I’m curious—how do you deal with this perception? Should we add notes in every README saying “This project is stable and doesn’t need updates”? Or is this just something that changes slowly over time as people better understand open source dynamics? Or, worst of all, should we start pushing out unnecessary updates just to show activity?

goku12 306 days ago |

I think the 'project is abandoned if not updated' mentality came from corporate development culture. Unfortunately, I don't see any other reasonable way to for users to evaluate the project status. This wasn't how free software ecosystem was supposed to operate.

And yes, the solution is to add a note right at the top of README, saying that the project is not abandoned and any new bugfixes or feature updates will be considered. Ideally, this should be standardized, with a common way to represent project status across all projects.

fernvenue 306 days ago | |

Thank you for sharing your perspective! You have prompted me to rethink this from the user's point of view. I believe we indeed need to first address the question of "how can we know if this project is still viable."

goku12 306 days ago | | |

There is a solution that's already in use in the Python ecosystem (PyPI). Python projects have a classifiers field. Development status is one of the main types of classifiers. It has 7 stages starting from 'Planning' and ending in 'Inactive'. Honestly, this solution is elegant and simple to implement.

We could an issue for code forges including github to implement it such that it is shown as project metadata along side license, language, etc. Perhaps the project can be automatically marked as inactive if the maintainer(s) don't respond every 3 months or so (of course with provision to easily revert it).

[1] https://pypi.org/classifiers/

fuzzfactor 306 days ago | | |

Well you might also need a mission accomplished banner but it needs to say something a little different than "mission accomplished".

It could even be something like a badge of honor for developers to strive for which needs to be earned. Like they have in industrial environments where they proudly post how many months or years they have gone without a serious injury.

Maybe people would respond positively to a prominent "safety notice", if I saw "No further defects found since July 2023" that would be more encouraging than not for a lot of projects.

jasonthorsness 306 days ago |

I agree on the note. Sometimes projects are “done”. I also think soon old projects can be set up to be maintained automatically (runtime, package upgrades, CVE etc.) by an agent in GitHub so that aspect of it will not be a concern to potential users.

i_v 306 days ago |

You just need an LLM agent that moves files around pointlessly, renames methods every so often without changing logic, bumps the year in your license. /s

On a more serious note, you can't force anyone to spend more than a minute looking at a repo. If they're just scanning around for a tool or framework, they're likely to narrow their decisions down to the ones that look like there's activity. In most cases, it's just higher signal that the maintainer's still around unless you're shipping some Linux utility that's been in use by distro maintainers since the 90s.

I think a GitHub-flavor markdown alert would help. Just a, "Hey, this is feature complete and still maintained. (today's date)"

I'm also curious, what's the project (if you don't mind sharing)? Happy to take a closer look.