Technology, just as everything else moves forward, and sometimes that means that a project gets superseeded by something else that is better, more performant and a more promising options long term. When your project reaches this phase, it still matters what process you choose to follow when you archive it, since abandoning it silently from one day to the other is harmful to everyone else who is still relying on it and is under the impression that the project is still maintained by the community.
In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Tom Sadler talks about te TAL (TV Application Layer) project, which they have been using on TV devices. While the project is still used within the BBC in some corner cases, it is largely replaced by web technologies by now. When it comes to the open source project, maintainers of the project chose to mark it clearly archived on GitHub and even left an email address for people to reach out in case they have a question or comment about the project. Surprisingly, this provided an opportunity to the ecosystem to still connect about the overall technology and problem space, which turend into a tech meetup series.
Learn about the stpes of archiving a project, such as:
- Marking it 'Archived' on its hosting platform
- Updating the README
- Closing issues and bug reports
- Closing Pull Requests or Reviews
- Leave contact information, if there's still someone who can follow up on questions and comments
Also keep in mind the CRA, as there are some requirements coming about how to properly archive a project!
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