Seeking Community Input on Package Maintenance Status Labels & Criteria

Community
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Hey everyone :waving_hand:

I am currently working on an ecosystem-wide audit of the JuliaHealth organization as part of a NumFOCUS Small Development Grant. One part of this work involves summarizing the maintenance status of packages in a way that’s informative but not misleading. I would love some community input to better finalize the terminology and criteria.

Context

In the audit, we initially experimented based on last pushed_at status with labels such as:

  • Active
  • Inactive
  • Maintenance mode

However, after discussion with my mentors, it became clear that terms like “inactive” can be misleading in an open-source context. In particular, some Julia packages may:

  • Have low commit frequency
  • Have few or no open issues
  • Receive updates only occasionally (e.g. once a year)…but still be:
    • Stable
    • Widely used
    • Functionally complete
    • Well-covered by CI

In these cases, low activity does not imply abandonment, it may simply reflect maturity.

Questions

  1. What terminology feels appropriate for categorizing packages in terms of maintainence level?
  2. What criteria would you associate with a “healthy but quiet” package?
  3. Are there any existing conventions, metrics or prior discussions in the Julia ecosystem that you think would be useful to follow or align with here?

This is purely for high-level ecosystem reporting and discovery, not as a judgment of package quality.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, I really really appreciate the community’s perspective here!

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Like Is it maintained? ?

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That’s a really good idea. Average resolution time at least speaks to maintenance.

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Yes, that makes sense, response or resolution time seem like a better signal of maintenance than commit frequency alone.