Project owners should be able to delete empty projects

[Matthew Revell]

If I create a project, do nothing with it and then decide I no longer want the project, I should be able to delete it myself.

Deleting such an empty project has no negative effect on the wider community. Enlisting Canonical staff to delete such projects does have a negative effect, as it takes time away from other things that could be of benefit to the community.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Also, from the duplicate, I should be able to delete a project if I own everything within it.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I do not think ownership is the rule. It is the community interactions that are important.

If and owner or owning team want to disable a project and they are the only interaction, we disable the project. This represents about 90% of all project closure requests.

If the project is linked to an Ubuntu package we cannot disable the project. Owners can gift the project to someone else. Some owner have removed the packaging links, but the project was later reactivated at the request of Ubuntu community members.

If the project has releases that have been downloaded (end-users), the project can be deactivated, but we have gotten requests to reactivate the project by end-users.

Users commonly revise the project to state it needs deleting within hours of registration. I deactivate the project during daily reviews.

I favour adding a delete action deactivates the project when Lp is certain that the project is not linked. I think downloads is a fuzzy condition and think it is easier to reactivate for in the rare end-user request than to deactivate it on behalf of a frustrated owner.

This recent flood of project closures is related to bug 106501 [Automatically warn about, then delete, unused projects] We have identifies that reminding people of projects does encourage users to deactivate them...they should not need to do the actual deactivation.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Curtis Hovey <email address hidden> wrote:
> I do not think ownership is the rule. It is the community interactions
> that are important.
>

Good point.

I also just want to re-iterate that we want to reduce the number of
things that the Registry team is called on to adjudicate. We want as
much self-service as possible.

jml