Hi all,

Just want to float an idea:

I realise bioinformatics/comp bio is a much smaller community than the broader software development community but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed the group of experts that routinely give their time to solve issues and help us newbies out. In return, perhaps those of you who are more experienced, and are authors/maintainers of packages, might consider using the 'good-first-issue' (or similar) tag on your repos even just for things like extra documentation that you might like but don't have time to do. That way as those of us who are newer progress we can contribute and perhaps lighten loads on maintainers, develop relevant skills and it might help reduce cycles of abandon-ware?

This is certainly not a novel idea as, anecdotally, friends who are in 'pure' computer science streams have said this is a similar type of format that they got involved with open source Go projects through and one of them on the Linux kernel. So, thoughts?

The authors/maintainers of Bioconductor packages might not have the package in a repository under version control outside Bioconductor. For those of us that do have them in Github, Gitlab, git... we might do so on each individual issue/bug report of our choice.

If you want to maintain a package that has been deprecated and likely to be removed on the following release you can check the news files on each release. For instance there are 29 software packages marked as deprecated in the latest release, perhaps some of them can be fixed.

Good luck

A "good first issue" for Bioconductor (which is itself a set of modular packages) might be to add a dataset to the Annotation- or ExperimentHub:

https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/vignettes/HubPub/inst/doc/CreateAHubPackage.html

The older packages often settle into stability, and may not be the best place to sandbox. Lluís Revilla Sancho has a good idea to look for packages that need help, often this is just a quick update that helps to avoid a vignette or test failing.