[development] adoption for 'abandoned' modules?

[Karen Stevenson]

Re the issue of co-maintainers:

1) Asking at the time a  person is first applying for cvs access is way too early. What if they are just getting ready to submit a module that actually never even goes anywhere? We don't need a co-maintainer for that. We need co-maintainers much later in the process -- after a module has been out and become adopted and established and important enough that it needs some looking after.

2) One feature for the project system that would help this process along would be a way to show a link to co-maintainer(s) on the project page. Currently you see a link only to the primary maintainer. You can look at commits and try to guess who a co-maintainer might be, but you might get that completely wrong. If we had a link there:

a) You would know there is a co-maintainer
b) You would have an easy way to get in contact with him/her

This would be useful not just to site maintainers, but to anyone who is having a problem and not getting a response from the primary maintainer.

Also, I would require that anyone listed as a maintainer must have their contact form enabled, otherwise they get de-listed and their project gets put up for adoption on a special adoption page. OK, maybe that last bit is a little strong :-) but whether or not there is a way to contact the maintainer should be another factor in our 'gold star' system.

Karen