Deconstruct "is this still maintained?"

[bensheldon]

Something that might help would be to dig more into the meaning of "is this still maintained?"

I'm the blog post, there are a lot of descriptive questions of support and maintenance, but they didn't quite hit my checklist as a consumer. Things like:

• do the maintainers reply to issues?
• do PRs get merged?
• does it work with the latest version of XYZ?
• if I go to the trouble of making a minor PR to fix something in their docs, is it worth it?
• how much time should I spend trying to make this tool work before I look at the next alternative on my list?

And as a maintainer, what comes to mind is the distance between my desire/intent to provide maintenance/support and reality.

To borrow from OOD, what's the "tell, don't ask" to these questions? I assume GitHub does a good job of the ask side and I usually do a visual scan of:

• open issues and PR count
• last commit on the file view
• quick scan of the readme to see if it's written in a user-centric way

You might also research how package manager websites (Rubygems, composer, npm) display information for a specific package or category as I assume they've done UX research on this problem.

Hope to continue the conversation and inquiry. Hope my thoughts are helpful 👍

[danielbachhuber]

Thanks for the input! I'll leave this issue open as something to consider as the project progresses / identifies its direction.