automatic orphaning of packages (was: Re: [Fwd: [RFC] Making NM 'by recommendation'])

[Brian Frederick Kimball <bfk@footbag.org>]

Manoj Srivastava wrote:

>  (yes, I am belabouring the obvious here). If you don't have enough
>  time, give some packages up. Either they get maintianed, or they are
>  dropped. Chances are that packages useful to others are going to be
>  picked up by people. 

The problem is that (it appears as if) a lot of developers go AWOL
without orphaning their packages.

Has anyone every considered automatic orphaning of packages?  Orphan
each package that hasn't been updated in a certain period of time that
has bugs with severities >= normal older than that same period of time
(6 months?).  That combined with the current practice of removing from
the distribution packages that have been orphaned for > 180 days could
go a long way towards cleaning up the distribution and ensuring that
packages that people still care about have active maintainers.

I'd be very interested in seeing which packages would be orphaned if the
above procedure was followed.