Abandoned crate policy

[joshtriplett]

This is separate from any kind of change to the squatting policy.

We should have a policy for abandoned crates, where the maintainer is non-responsive for an extremely long period of time, doesn't answer mails even to say "yes" or "no", and doesn't answer issues or pull requests, someone can potentially take on maintenance.

We may or may not want that to take place by giving ownership of the original crate. Rather, we might have a technical means of providing patch indications, along the lines of "dependencies on foo can be satisfied by the fooier crate after this version".

We could learn from the Debian project here. They have an "MIA" process for detecting inactive developers/maintainers, as well as a "provides" mechanism.

[cheako]

Looking at a crate I think might be abandoned I see the only contact as part of the crate is email address. Given the private nature of email I think it is important to start ASAP with a website that sends 'reply to this email, if still active'.

This will create an important metric, through testing, about the issue. We need to know sooner rather than later how prolific an issue this is... Especially in these times when we may be faced with many maintainers tragically "passing on."

[michaelgriffindrake]

Need a Policy for Abandoned Crates

I too would like to see the policy updated on Abandoned Crates. There is a crate name I would like to use for the project I'm working on, but it's currently being used by a crate that hasn't been updated in five years, the website and GitHub repo has been deleted and reaching out to the author via email has not yielded any response.