Gihub repo owner (Yii2-user) left repository - How to proceed?

Question

Yii2-user is a very popular Yii2 extension for user management. There are lots of forks and contributors. Many issues and PRs are awaiting for being integrated or at least answered.

But there is no activity from the repo owner since over 3 months which is very untypical for him compared to his activity before.

Currently I am sitting on a fork and maintaining my branches. This works for a short time but I do not get PRs from the others and cannot sync with the original repo anymore.

What is a common practice to make a repo survive if the owner abandons its repo (and cannot be reached)? How to proceed as a single fork owner and as community of all fork owners?

Answer 1

Repos should be handed-off before being abandoned.

The whole point of git and github, is maintaining a chain of authority and revision. If a repo is abandoned, no-one can access it, take it over, or pass it along, except the owner. If this isn't possible, then you'll have to make your current fork a new master, and try to re-organize communities of other forks, to hopefully source yours as the new main branch. Good luck with that.