Seeking Community Input on Package Maintenance Status Labels & Criteria

kosuri-indu
Wed, 21 Jan 2026 06:33:51 +0000
Community

Hey everyone

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!

11 posts - 10 participants