What to do about unmaintained ELPA packages

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Hi,

There are some popular packages on GNU ELPA (and I expect NonGNU ELPA)
that are practically unmaintained.  One example would be Yasnippet that
has been gathering issues and pull requests on GitHub, mostly without
any comments whatsoever.  For example, see
https://github.com/joaotavora/yasnippet/issues.  Does anyone know of any
other packages of this kind?

I'd like to ask, if there some point at which should one should go from
regarding packages like these from "de facto unmaintained" to "actually
abandoned"?  Perhaps if there was no real activity for over a year,
despite constant contributions?  Would it make sense to call for anyone
new to take over maintaining the package?  Or depending on how long the
package has been unmaintained, how popular the package is, how much
effort it would take to apply the changes one could modify the package
in elpa.git/nongnu.git and inform the maintainers that if they decide to
start working on the package again, that there are downstream changes
that they should look at.