I've recently noticed that a lot of the packages available on Dub are rather old: 80% of the 1475 packages available haven't been updated for at least a year, and around 50% are five years old or even older. This is a shame, as there are some really neat libraries on Dub that I'd love to use, but I'm just a little bit afraid to start using a package that likely won't have any active upstream support; even if I were to fix any bugs I found myself, there's no good way to get the fix out to others if the original author/maintainer isn't around to merge your fixes into the upstream repo.

I recently learned about the Code Shelter project. It looks like a really neat resource, and the fellow who started the project says that although the Code Shelter seems inactive, it's more due to a lack of proper marketing than to people bailing on it. I think that the D community could potentially make use of the Code Shelter by adopting it for various packages and promoting its use. For example, when somebody is adding a new package to code.dlang.org, they could be shown a prompt encouraging them to add their project to the Code Shelter if they are comfortable with that; if a package owner is inactive for a certain amount of time, they could be sent an email encouraging them to look into the Code Shelter.

I will add the disclaimer that this is just an off-the-cuff idea that I want to put out there; however, I think that having a package maintenance solution like the Code Shelter in place for the Dub package registry would be a big boon to the D ecosystem. I'm interested in hearing feedback on this idea :)