Hi, I’d like to propose an organization to take on ownership of orphaned libraries, giving them a place where PRs can be submitted and someone will be able to approve them/grant permission over projects to new people as they get involved in the library. I would like to be able to take in projects that HA uses as libraries when their original maintainers abandon them. any project held by only a single person is at a high risk of abandonment, whether by the original maintainer losing interest, losing access to their account or some other factor.
Is this a good idea? what would i need to do to get this idea off the ground?
The decision to force all API logic to be in a pypi library removes the burden of the HA core team to review this code. However, it basically forces these libraries into the situation you are referring to, where a library is built by one person, and no one else gets involved. This leads to abandoned libraries and poor code in general. Ideally, this policy would foster the libraries being used by other softwares outside of home assistant, which widens the net of developers who would contribute. In practice, this probably only happens for a few libraries.
What you are proposing sounds like boiling the ocean to me. There are tons of abandoned libraries.
I’m not sure what the solution is. I think one definitively positive step is to contribute to the libraries you use most often to keep them alive. There is no reason you cannot do this today. If the original maintainer has abandoned it, you can fork it and then switch the library in home assistant. I’m sure home assistant devs would rather have an actively maintained library than an abandoned one.
I’m not talking about attempting to take on all libraries, but rather a place for people to create forks of un-maintained libraries as they have a reason to update them, then in the future, if the maintainer loses interest, the next person to become interested can take it over without having to fork it.
It is indeed a good idea, to have a “community” repo for custom libs/integrations/plugins in abandoned state.
Not sure what you’re expecting from others at this point, though. Just create an organization on github or gitlab and go ahead for stuff that matter to you.
People will hopefully join for stuff they are interested in and if it picks up speed, people creating new integrations would maybe host them directly there as well…