Policy for Abandoned Extensions

Hello Hackers,

A couple times in the last year, people have hit me up to ask about taking ownership of abandoned extensions on PGXN. In neither case was I able to track down the original owner, not for lack of trying. Then this past week I was alerted to potential superuser escalations in two more abandoned extensions on PGXN.

PGXN has no policy around this. In the first case I eventually transferred ownership after discussing it with other developers. The second I added the inquiring developer as a co-owner, meaning the original owner could come back and still manage it on PGXN, make releases, etc. But this isn’t great, IMO, and not scalable.

So I think it may be time for a policy on this. What do you recommend? I have a few thoughts and options, some of which would require additional work on PGXN at some point.

* Set up a committee of some kind to investigate abandoned extensions and find vet and find replacement developers when possible.

* Cease transferring extensions without permission from long-gone developers and instead suggest that people fork extensions and give them new names.

* Add an annotation to apparently abandoned extensions and mark them as such on pgxn.org, along with relevant pointers to replacement extensions and contact information for the original developer to get in touch and reclaim access. Or maybe it goes away if they create a new release.

What do you think?

Best,

David