On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
I'm still hoping that someone will make Hackage able to support user reviews and ratings, so that well-engineered packages get the good feedback they deserve, and stand out from the crowd.
As Chris Kuklewicz explains in the other thread "package spam", an unmaintained package is often not generated by someone who uploads a new version where only the Cabal field Maintainer is removed or changed to the empty string. Actually a package most oftenly becomes unmaintained by being not updated for a long time. Thus I think the time of the last release, the highest compiler version it is tested with and so on may be sorting criteria for finding out the most up-to-date packages. If nevertheless an unmaintained flag should be managed, this should be part of HackageDB (like user reviews), not part of Cabal. But then I wonder who shall decide whether a package is maintained or not. Sometimes users are afraid that a package is unmaintained because there was no new release for half a year, although patches are constantly committed to a darcs repository.