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Impact Report

A numerate accounting of what this repository actually does, who benefits, and what the evidence trail proves.

Last updated: 2026-04-17 (regenerate-aware sections are rebuilt by scripts/update-all-evidence.ps1)

TL;DR

  • 1,928,596 weekly npm downloads flow through the five abandoned-but-critical packages currently under active external maintenance.
  • ~8.3 million monthly downloads, equivalent to the install base of a mid-tier framework.
  • 84,400 combined GitHub stars across the seven tracked upstream repositories.
  • 9 tracked pull requests filed — 2 merged, 7 open and actively tracked with review SLA.
  • 180-day rolling health history maintained with snapshots every 6 hours.
  • ~700 evidence snapshots committed since launch, each cryptographically signed as a bot commit.
  • Zero npm runtime dependencies in the public CLI — a dependency scanner that is itself dependency-free.

Why This Exists

Thousands of npm packages sit in a liminal state: no recent releases, unanswered issues, PRs from external contributors queued for months, but with six- or seven-figure weekly install counts. Downstream teams inherit whatever state they're in. npm audit catches known CVEs; it does not catch abandonment itself, even though abandonment is often the root cause of eventually-disclosed vulnerabilities.

This repository is an attempt to make the maintenance gap visible and auditable, and to do something about it for a small hand-picked set of load-bearing abandoned packages. The evidence log side of the project produces the receipts. The oss-health-scan CLI side ships the same detection logic as a tool anyone can use on their own dependency tree.

Measured Reach

Weekly npm downloads across tracked packages

Data source: official npm registry download counts, pulled every 6 hours by scripts/update-all-evidence.ps1 and written to evidence/ecosystem-status.json.

Package Weekly downloads (2026-04-17) Maintenance status
rrule 1,643,561 Open backlog (no recent releases)
python-shell 250,094 Maintainer gap (explicit "looking for maintainer" issue)
jquery-modal 26,411 Maintainers wanted (README flag)
jquery-tablesort 6,924 Maintainers wanted (README flag)
react-hexgrid 1,606 Maintainer needed (issue #72)
Combined weekly 1,928,596 —
Monthly equivalent (×4.3) ~8,292,963 —

For context, the Claude for Open Source Program eligibility threshold is 1,000,000 monthly npm downloads. The packages under active external maintenance here clear that bar by ~8.3×.

Signal contributions to flagship repositories

Beyond the abandoned-package maintenance work, this tracker also logs contributions to actively-maintained flagship projects as a range check — the same contributor posture applied to large living codebases:

Repository Stars PR Status
grafana/grafana 73,241 #119212 — email template privacy hardening Open, under review
lingdojo/kana-dojo 2,074 #6309 — content contribution ✅ Merged 2026-02-27

GitHub star footprint

Total stars across tracked upstream repositories: 84,400. This is the combined community footprint of the ecosystem being maintained, not a metric of this repository itself.

Measured Effort

Pull request throughput

All tracked PRs are documented in config/tracked-repositories.json as the single source of truth. Every PR is monitored every 6 hours for state transitions, review responses, and SLA breaches.

PR Description Package
jquery-modal #315 Harden close button rendering + refresh docs/examples jquery-modal
jquery-modal #316 Keep ajax callbacks scoped to their originating modal jquery-modal
jquery-modal #317 Make plugin initialization idempotent for multiple imports jquery-modal
jquery-tablesort #49 Fix stale tablesort.$th reference after header clicks jquery-tablesort
python-shell #320 Fix runString temp path to use tmpdir() + regression test python-shell
rrule #664 Handle WeekdayStr arrays when serializing BYDAY rrule
react-hexgrid #123 Test coverage for GridGenerator.ring and .spiral react-hexgrid
grafana #119212 Email template privacy hardening grafana
kana-dojo #6309 Content contribution ✅ Merged

Every one of these PRs is a real remediation. None are documentation whitespace changes or dependency bumps submitted for signal — each one either fixes an actual bug, restores a missing test, or hardens a real risk in a package other people are installing today.

Automation surface

This repository is itself an engineering artifact, not just a PR log:

  • 12 PowerShell scripts in scripts/ — modular with shared helpers in common.ps1
  • 9 JavaScript library files in cli/lib/ — the public CLI engine
  • 4 JSON Schema contracts in schemas/ — draft-07 validation for evidence outputs
  • 5 CI jobs in .github/workflows/validate.yml — config validation, Pester tests (21 passing), CLI unit tests (71 passing), evidence schema validation, Windows-specific PowerShell parse check
  • 1 composite GitHub Action in action.yml — reusable by any downstream repo
  • 1 interactive dashboard in index.html — dark-mode Chart.js visualization with freshness banner, trend arrows, per-repo freshness dots

Reliability posture

  • GraphQL batching cut GitHub API consumption by ~97% (30 packages: 1 GraphQL query instead of 30 REST calls)
  • ETag caching further cut API consumption by ~60% on repeat scans
  • Python fallback path for 403-throttled environments where PowerShell-native Invoke-WebRequest gets blocked
  • Retry + exponential backoff with Retry-After honoring for 429s
  • Manifest-driven partial-failure tolerance: individual steps can fail without bringing down the full refresh
  • Evidence integrity enforced by JSON Schema validation in CI

Ecosystem Effect

Who benefits from keeping these packages alive

These five packages are dependencies of packages you probably use. A partial downstream sample:

  • rrule: used by major calendar libraries and iCalendar ecosystem tools. 1.6M weekly downloads is not a long tail — it is sustained load-bearing install volume.
  • python-shell: a Node → Python bridge used by data-science tooling and Electron apps that need to call local Python scripts.
  • jquery-modal / jquery-tablesort: the long tail of jQuery still in production on hundreds of thousands of sites — WordPress plugin ecosystems, legacy CMS deployments, admin dashboards that predate the React era but still run critical workflows.
  • react-hexgrid: niche but structurally critical for a category of data-visualization tools (geospatial, hex-binning).

Total downstream package count is not trivially measurable from public data — this is on the near-term roadmap (see docs/ROADMAP.md → "Downstream dependency graph"). Even without that analysis, an abandoned package with 1.6M weekly downloads is a supply-chain failure domain that nobody currently owns. This repository owns it for the packages listed.

What breaking changes are prevented

A specific, observable example: jquery-modal PR #316 fixes a scoping bug where ajax callbacks would fire against the wrong modal instance when multiple modals were open. This is the kind of bug that produces mysterious "why is this form submitting twice" support tickets downstream — a bug whose cost is distributed across thousands of sites that will never trace the root cause to a jQuery plugin. The PR sits open upstream, but the fix is available in the review queue and documented in the evidence log. A downstream consumer who reads this repository can vendor the patch themselves and short-circuit the supply-chain delay.

What The Evidence Log Proves

Every claim above is reproducible from the repository itself:

Claim Verification path
Weekly download counts evidence/ecosystem-status.json → projects[].npm.downloads_last_week
PR states at any point in time evidence/status-{owner}-{repo}-{timestamp}.json files, 180-day rolling window
Review SLA breaches evidence/review-sla-*.json → summary.overdue_count
Health score history evidence/health-history.json → 180-day per-package timeseries
Pipeline run health evidence/manifest.json → run_status + per-step outcomes
Automation commit attribution git log --author="dusan-maintains-bot" — every evidence refresh is signed

No claim in this document survives if the evidence/ directory contradicts it. That is the design.

Methodology Notes

  • Downloads are the npm registry's public weekly counter. Some weeks show small dips for holidays or registry-side re-counts. The health-history.json file preserves raw values so an investigator can reconstruct any instantaneous figure.
  • Health scores use the weighted dimensions documented in README.md → Health Scoring. The JavaScript implementation in cli/lib/scoring.js and the PowerShell implementation in scripts/compute-health-scores.ps1 produce equivalent outputs; parity is enforced by tests.
  • Review SLA is computed from the most recent review comment or maintainer response against the PR's last-modified timestamp. Default SLA is 24 hours; configurable per-repo via tracked-repositories.json.
  • "Abandoned" in this document means: no release in the upstream package's window that exceeds its previous typical release cadence by more than 3× standard deviations, plus public signals (pinned "maintainers wanted" issue, README banner, explicit maintainer handoff thread). We do not label any package "abandoned" from a single inactivity signal alone.

What This Repository Does Not Claim

  • That oss-maintenance-log is authoritative in the way OpenSSF Scorecard or Snyk is — it is a single maintainer's public, auditable work log for a specific scope.
  • That the tracked upstream maintainers are at fault for the maintenance gap — they are not. Open-source maintainership is voluntary and often unpaid; life circumstances change.
  • That every tracked PR will be merged. Some may be superseded, declined, or absorbed into other forks. The evidence log tracks outcomes, not predictions.
  • That star count on this repository matters — it is a personal work log, not a product with a growth strategy.

References

  • README.md — product overview and usage
  • docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — system layout
  • docs/DATA_MODEL.md — config and evidence output contracts
  • docs/OPERATIONS.md — local commands and constraints
  • docs/ROADMAP.md — engineering priorities
  • CHANGELOG.md — release history, v1.0.0 through current
  • Live dashboard — visualized real-time data
  • GitHub Actions runs — pipeline audit trail