DEV Community

shadowtime2000
shadowtime2000

Posted on

How do You Tell if a Project is Maintained?

How do you tell if a project is maintained? Is it commit activity release activity the rate at which maintainers respond to issues and PRs or a combination of that?

Top comments (9)

Collapse
 
igordsm profile image
Igor Montagner

The way I see it, it depends on what a "maintained" project looks like for you. For me it means there is a team is actively accepting new Pull Requests from other developers. There's also activity in the bug tracker and constructive comments on PRs. I consider specially important that the maintainers are currently accepting contributions. These mean that there's a community around it that still cares about the development of the software.

Some people are OK with one or two developers working on it on and off for the last few years. I would not base a commercial project on this, but it can be OK for small experiments or personal projects.

Collapse
 
actionjackson86 profile image
Jackson Roach

I usually look at commit activity, build status, release and PR activity.

Collapse
 
shadowtime2000 profile image
shadowtime2000

Does build status really apply though? I see many really maintained and popular projects with failing build statuses. Also by PR activity, are you talking about stale/no response on PRs?

Collapse
 
actionjackson86 profile image
Jackson Roach

I guess build status doesn't really imply maintained, but if it's passing builds I know it's actively maintained.

Stale PRs is for sure a big indicator, but I think more important is PR's that are merged, as well as commits.

Collapse
 
jonyk56 profile image
Jonyk56

if maintainers respond to issues, and if it is archived

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.