I don’t like the idea of a separate group to track orphaned packages. It seems like a lot of overhead, plus few people are likely to be aware of and care about it.
I think “hijacking” packages should be encouraged if… (rough guidelines)
- The license allows for it (Let the creator of the original package enforce this, if they care to.)
- A package is at least one LTS release behind.
- An effort was made to contact the previous maintainer(s).
- The new releaser adds his name & email to the package manifest, aka rosdistro.
Maybe bloom could check for a change to the maintainers or source url and display this checklist when it detects a change.