I'm happy to announce that with the upgrades to the ROS infrastructure, specifically REP 137, we can now provide a maintainer status for catkin based packages for Groovy [1] and Hydro [2].  If you browse these status pages you will see now not just the versions and build status, but also the maintainer and the maintenance status.  This is part of our effort to make the development status of packages more easily discoverable to users.  

All packages are initialized to unknown and maintainers are asked to submit a pull request to state that they will maintain the package for this rosdistro.  Each successive rosdistro will request that maintainers resubmit pull requests to declare their intent to continue maintaining the package.  After most maintainers are filled in and the state of the system is determined we will put out a call for adoption for packages which do not have active maintainers.  

We have 4 supported maintenance levels: 

developed

maintained

unmaintained

end-of-life

More details the status definitions can be found in REP 137 [3]

If you are a maintainer please submit a pull request to state the expected level of maintenance.  If you are not currently a maintainer please consider reviewing packages which you use or care about and consider volunteering to maintain them if there is a call for adoption.  Being a maintainer is not a large commitment to do significant development, it is simply to keep packages up to date and make the occasional release.  

To update maintainer status you need to submit a pull request to the rosdistro repo.  Some examples are included below. 

Tully

[1] http://www.ros.org/debbuild/groovy.html

[2] http://www.ros.org/debbuild/hydro.html

[3] http://ros.org/reps/rep-0137.html

Example Pull Requests:

https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/755

https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/750