I also think the Debian procedure sounds good. The job of the “QA group” here wouldn’t have to be that they automatically become maintainers for all abandoned packages (OSRF doesn’t have the resources to do that). But it would be nice to have a procedure for orphaning and adopting packages. I imagine it could go like this:
- maintainer decides to orphan package, gives github “admin” access to QA group
- package is added to a list of orphaned packages
- someone decides to adopt package, QA group transfers admin access to new maintainer
Most of this could be automated. To further reduce the burden on OSRF, the QA group could be a set of volunteers that’s only managed by OSRF.
Of course this is only going to solve the cases where a maintainer makes a conscious decision to orphan a package instead of just gradually moving on to other things.