I have been using the excellent bigdata:visit-tracker package for some time now.
However, it seems it uses the now deprecated “freegeoip” API that has been updated and will expire on July 1st.
bigdata:visit-tracker is still very visible on Atmosphere, but no trace of it on github anymore.
Has it been abandoned?
If so, who else has been experiencing the same issue of abandonment of Meteor packages?
I don’t think this is a Meteor specific issue, but more of an issue with open source. Many times an author creates a package for personal use and releases it in case others find it useful. After some time they move on to other things and lack the time, financial support or both for necessary maintenance and updates grind to a hault.
Maintaining around 20 packages myself, I know how much work goes into keeping on top of current FOSS projects. I do however try to deprecate and set-unmigrated any packages I’m no longer able to keep up with, and that needs to happen more often across the board.
Sure! I can only thanks for the people like you that take all the trouble and apply all the knowledge to bring us such excellent packages.
For sure, it is part of the nature of open source that some will be lost with time.
It would be nice to have in Atmosphere or in the forum, some way to sort out which projects have potentially been abandoned. I think it could be helpful to everybody.
You can flag projects and then (after more people have done it) a red flag is going to appear next to the package warning people that the package is no longer maintained. There was a drive to flag packages around v1.0 of meteor after a migration from the old package system. Maybe we should organize something like that again.
We do need to be careful. I have some packages which still work just fine, and which I haven’t had the need to update. However, going by the lack of activity, you would be forgiven for thinking they’re abandonware.
@storyteller , your idea is very clever! But as @robfallows pointed out, we should be very careful.
For instance, It turned out that this package wasn’t the culprit of the “freegeoip” deprecation. It still works perfectly. It is just not being updated anymore nor its github repository is available.
I think a real solution would be a much needed update to Atmosphere adding features that allow for proper evaluation of that status of a package. The “Rank” that atmosphere gives a package is a nice idea but other indicators would be nice. Unfortunately I don’t see any updates flowing forth due to MDG’s already thin resources and there’s no possible way for us to make the updates ourselves since the source isn’t available.
Unfortunately the only option this leaves us is to build a community version of Atmosphere. I’m not personally against this, but it would take some rallying of support and getting motivated people behind it.
Isn’t that fastosphere?
Yes sort of 
. That may be a good starting point, but also seems to be largely abandoned.
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When Fastosphere was operational, while faster than Atmosphere, still lacked the necessary package metrics that I find myself having to hunt down when I’m making a decision to use a package or not.
Yeah - I did mean as a starting point, it’s not been kept up to date.
Perhaps an opportunity for some atmosphere / npm synergy too.
You mean like bringing in NPM results as well?
Exactly that. Especially for those packages that have been superseded by those in npm.
An example would be simple-schema package. Would be nice. Maybe adding an option to package.js to link to the new package and to mark the package deprecated/abandoned/… might be a first step or some sort of advanced management that @copleykj mentioned.
As it stands now we have only the flagging. I don’t advocate for indiscriminate flagging, obviously as was mentioned there are many cases where the package still works and is finished without any needs to update the code, but in few cases the package no longer works - those should be flagged.
I think that bringing Atmosphere and NPM together is a fantastic idea. That would help many as they move to NPM packages.