Looking through pkg.julialang.org I noticed quite a few packages that look to be obsolete (n years since being updated, all tests failing). I had a go at “adopting” one recently, and made a PR, but I suspect that the author has moved on to other things.
Is there likely to be a clear out of obsolete packages some day? Perhaps some kind of “JuliaMorgue” org could be created where dead packages could be moved and preserved for posterity?
See also: https://github.com/JuliaArchive
I’m not aware of an active deprecation policy, but there have been efforts to put appropriate compatibility upper bounds in METADATA for unmaintained packages.
As an author of more than one of more than one obsolete package, I’m glad to see this, too. Pkg3 should clear out a lot of those.
On a related side note, I recently updated an obsolete package of mine (Sims.jl). This was last updated around Julia v0.3. I had sort-of given up on it, thinking that it would be a lot of work to bring it back up to date. On a whim, I gave it a quick shot, and I was surprised that I got something working in Julia v0.5 in about an hour. It’s still not perfectly up-to-date and in sync with API’s in dependent packages, but it went much easier than I expected. So, kudos to the Julia team for your rigorous use of deprecations, updates in NEWS, and for Compat.jl.
So, if you see an obsolete package of interest, you might try forking it to bring it up to date.
Is there going to be a big “re-submit your package” day, do you think, or some kind of automatic transfer…?