I fully agree with @dirk-thomas’s conclusion. A package shouldn’t be released without somebody actually willing to maintain it.
BTW, I’m strictly against forking/copying repos if it can be avoided. If the repos have to change place (for example, to be moved into the ros-drivers organization), the move functionality of GitHub should be used by the current owner. That way, all issues etc. are preserved, people don’t open issues on the wrong repo, and even the old URLs still work because GitHub creates a redirect.
For reference, these are the packages that sparked this discussion:
- ktossell/libuvc_ros (contains libuvc_camera package)
- ktossell/camera_umd
- ros-drivers/gscam
- longjie/ps4eye
All of the maintainers still seem to be reachable, so if somebody steps forward and volunteers to maintain one of them, the current maintainer could give them write (or better “admin”) access.