On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 7:37 AM, River Tarnell <river@loreley.flyingparchment.org.uk> wrote:

the problem is that having the infrastructure doesn't make people use it. i've
been trying to encourage people to move popular projects to stable and decouple
them from a single maintainer, but i can't force people to do it, and most
people don't have the time or inclination.

i don't think "banning" single-maintainer projects will accomplish anything.
most popular tools started off as something small written by one person, and if
we don't allow people to write things themselves, how will these tools develop?
if we were to do this, all that would happen is there would be no tools left.

Do you think it might be possible to encourage people to use the infrastructure more? My thinking here is to make it easier for multi-user projects and make it slightly more annoying for single user ones. This could be something like a longer waiting time for (one week vs. couple days) to get migrated to the stable server. Or it could be something in the STABLE signup form, where it says "if I don't respond within 30 days, my project can have a maintainer added at the discretion of the toolserver admins". (30 days here was just arbitrary ... the important thing is there is some limit to the loss of contact).