This would be a great feature. I have some projects floating around in various places that I haven't worked on in years, some of them very stupid looking back at them, and all of them not incredibly high in code-quality.
I still get support requests or requests for advice once in a while from people trying to use them, or thinking of hacking on them -- and these aren't even close to being popular projects.
I'm doing most of my open development on github these days, and this would mesh extremely well with the way that git hub, and more generally DVCS works.
Another possible nicety would be the ability to mark a repo as the "canonical" repo for a project. Right now that kinda happens with forks on github, but if a project is abandoned, and another person picks up maintenance on it, it would be nice to be able to say "this isn't the current repo anymore, look here instead" in a manner that isn't just putting a notice somewhere.
I think the new organizations feature of Github is an excellent way to address the need for a "canonical" repository. The fact that you can define an org for each open source project or group, and then add other users as admins mitigates the problems if the project changes hands, or gains a new primary maintainer. Just add the new "owner" as an admin for the group/repo, and nobody needs to be the wiser.
Yeah, but adding a whole organization for each open source repo? I have tons of small gems/libraries that solve one specific problem, and all enjoy their share of users/
I don't want to setup a bunch of organizations just because they might change owners at some point in the future.
'Another possible nicety would be the ability to mark a repo as the "canonical" repo for a project'
"When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor." (1)
I think something like this is the ideal solution, and - as kaens says above - I think if features are to be added then it would be great if they supported this process rather than just marking a project as abandoned.
I still get support requests or requests for advice once in a while from people trying to use them, or thinking of hacking on them -- and these aren't even close to being popular projects.
I'm doing most of my open development on github these days, and this would mesh extremely well with the way that git hub, and more generally DVCS works.
Another possible nicety would be the ability to mark a repo as the "canonical" repo for a project. Right now that kinda happens with forks on github, but if a project is abandoned, and another person picks up maintenance on it, it would be nice to be able to say "this isn't the current repo anymore, look here instead" in a manner that isn't just putting a notice somewhere.