Please see the REPs 127 / 140 which already describe something like such a “QA group”.
You can use the following maintainer information in the package manifest:
- name:
Unmaintained see http://wiki.ros.org/MaintenanceGuide#Claiming_Maintainership - email:
ros-orphaned-packages@googlegroups.com
If you release a package with this information you should subscribe to that Google group and act on future notification emails for the packages. Otherwise it will be the same problem that nobody gets notified and takes action on build failures in the future. I also want to clarify that OSRF does not have the resources to subscribe to that group, investigate incoming messages and act on them.
I see the risk that if multiple people are subscribing to the mailing list nobody might act on incoming notification emails. But I guess that is something the potential QA group needs to figure out.
Regarding the location of “orphaned” repositories: I don’t think moving them around when the maintainer status changes (which could happen multiple times over time) is beneficial. Consider users having cloned such a repository and the org unit is changing just for the sake of grouping them. Also the maintainer status in the distribution files already provides a good list to enumerate such packages. Adding a filter for that on the status pages would be great - patches adding this functionality would be highly appreciated.