Reply to post: A year seems a bit too low... Three years maybe?

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

Philip Storry
FAIL

A year seems a bit too low... Three years maybe?

On the one hand I see where GitLab is coming from. Inactive projects can be a risk to the general software ecosystem, so this could be seen as a good move.

But in my experience working for larger companies, there's no agility there. The idea that anything gets updated to a later version more than every few years is laughable. So a one year timeout is useless.

Even in personal computing, it's only Macs that get yearly software updates. Most Linux distros (rolling ones excepted) ship a new update every two years or so at best. So if I'm using one of these projects and it doesn't work on the latest version of Python, how am I going to know before the project's repo gets pulled? I have literally no chance of finding out and reporting it, which leaves the developer in a very poor position.

And before someone says "Well, they could always just make a change every year" - really? An unnecessary change just to keep the repo open? Time flies past, a year can feel like the blink of an eye. And if the developer regards the project as complete - or has just moved on to another personal project - a year could easily feel like a month for that project.

After a few years and a few projects, this will become quite a hassle.

Frankly, a year feels way too low. Three years feels more reasonable, given the cadence of software development these days.

(As an aside, I was evaluating GitLab and GitHub for deployment at my work. I'd already picked GitHub, but it was very close and this does nothing to make me think I was wrong.)

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