Imagine you are using some npm or pip package and you feel it is outdated or it just says somewhere "is not maintained anymore". What should you do first - find out whether there is someone else who already started maintaining, let me show you how to do it 😉
How to understand the package is not maintained anymore
First, find the page of the interesting package on the source code hosting website. I will consider [email protected] package for npm, I know that I am using exactly this package by package.json or package-lock.json file.
To find the opensource hosting page, first, we should find the package name on https://npmjs.com with the exact name.
NOTE: Name is very important when you try find a package sources page☝. Please carefully follow the sequence otherwise you can mix up a packages an all your effort will be lost. This happens very often
Now look at Repository or Homepage: Here we see so "dead" package:
The first solution to try when "repo is not maintained anymore"
Click on forks number and find out the most popular fork. To understand popularity faster we might assume that a more popular fork will have more forks. So we should just find the longest fork chain and see who is on second level after original repo:
So we've found https://github.com/vusion/webfonts-generator by vusion which also re-published it to a new npm package, we can see this by checking Readme file:
npm install --save-dev vusion-webfonts-generator
Here how it works. In the worst case, you can fork a project and start maintaining it or just use it by yourself for your fixes✌
![NPM install killed without a reason [Fixed]](https://s.hinty.io/BrLpDos8apbS86Ds4BQWCh.png)
