I think the obsession with "being maintained" is somewhat unhealthy phenomenon in the FOSS world. If the code works and does what you want then why would it need constant fiddling and consistent stream of releases?
The code may need to be adapted to evolving environments. Security bugs might be discovered. In this case I guess "being maintained" just means that someone will react to such events if they happen.
Couldn't programmers from major GNU/Linux distributions be signed up for this duty? They compile new OSes and if they want man pages (heck, who doesn't want man pages?) then it's also up to them to make it work in the new OS. Security bugs can be forwarded to those people by Gnu (assuming they support and host the project).
This may not work for everything, they're not going to maintain any old system, but things that we want to keep around but for which there are not necessarily dedicated maintainers to keep it up...
I would go further and call this an obsession with using software that is literally changing by the day, in a constant state of flux.
There seems a desire among those users who comment in forums to see recent commits to the software they use as if infrequent commits or no commits in years suggests there is something wrong with the software.
To me, it is the constant changes and updates that give me pause when choosing software. I am actually more skeptical of large, complex software that requires constant updating.
I prefer software which can deliver reliable performance year after year without changes, e.g., daemontools. But hey, what do I know?
In any event, I am glad to see this comment. I wish more folks would call out this silly obsession.
> as if infrequent commits or no commits in years suggests there is something wrong with the software.
I would be reluctant to start using a package that wasn't actively developed. Libraries, APIs and even languages evolve, and I don't want to be stuck relying on old versions of other things because of one package that isn't being updated. You might say that all the other pieces should take version compatibility much more seriously, to avoid this problem, but that's not the world we're in.
More importantly, since all non trivial software has bugs, if there have been no commits for years, either no-one's using it and finding the bugs, or the maintainer isn't merging people's patches. Both options sound bad for me as a user.
I understand that a program could theoretically be 'done', not requiring any further changes, but I think there's hardly any software that could conceivably be so 'done' it wouldn't have any commits in months or years. I've just looked up a few of the most stable major projects I can think of: the Linux kernel, Apache and Subversion all have multiple commits within the last day. GNU coreutils only has five in the last week.
