DEPRECATION marker for unmaintained XLETs?

[anaximeno]

Some extensions, applets, etc, don't seem to be working very well on recent Cinnamon versions, besides we see that for example new ones have surged to solve their issues, I wonder if it wouldn't be worth it to have some kind of deprecation notice or something in the lines to either mark the xlet as obsolete in current Cinnamon versions, unmaintained, or even scheduled for removal. The results of this could be either incentivizing new maintainers to the xlets, avoiding users using obsolete xlets, and also giving better treatment to xlets considering the influx of new ones since creating them nowadays is easier thanks to stuff like AI-assisted development tools.

An example of this is the "Wobbly Windows" extension that doesn't seem to be working very well, and can be replaced by the another extension with the goal for the same window effect "Compiz Window Effect".

Possibly the phases of handling this could be a marker in the metadata of xlets, that would then appear in the respective settings module for the respective xlets types (maybe as an information tip, or something), and then after some time it is marked for removal. I'm open for a better workflow in this matter.

[klangman]

Did you swap around the "Compiz Window Effect" and "Wobbly Windows"? I think "Compiz Window Effect" is the newer one that works better and has more features. In fact I just added new code to it a few days ago and the original developer/maintainer has not completely disappeared (but I don't suspect he is planning any future work on it).

But I do support the general idea. Broken spices should be blocked on Cinnamon versions where they don't work and abandoned spices should be marked as such so users know not to expect any new fixes/features.

[Fantu]

Maybe something similar to Debian packages (at least in terms of terms, but some things would be different).
I don't know if it's a single status or separate lists. It should be known if it's actively maintained, if the maintainer needs help, if it's abandoned/orphaned (and a new maintainer can take over), if there's an app that's no longer needed, will be removed, or has been replaced by another (perhaps deprecated).

I don't use applets much and I don't monitor the repository, so I don't know exactly what the situation is. It would be good to see if the version compatibility system is already sufficient and if there aren't any particular problems. If not, it would be useful to determine where improvements can be made based on the reported issues.

Perhaps some sort of app quality rating could also be added (which can also vary depending on the development stage), for example, experimental, unstable, or stable. This can be partially set by the maintainer and partially changed by the Mint team if, based on user reports, the real status differs.

from a quick look to some recent PR merges of applets repo the most active members in reviewing applets seem to be @rcalixte @claudiux and so should have more information regarding the current situation and what might be best to do

[anaximeno]

Did you swap around the "Compiz Window Effect" and "Wobbly Windows"? I think "Compiz Window Effect" is the newer one that works better and has more features.

Yes @klangman, it is indeed the inverse here, thanks for the correction!