On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, 17:21 Jonathan Wakely <jwakely@fedoraproject.org wrote:

This assumes there is a queue of ready and willing (and competent)
volunteers to take on packages that get automatically orphaned. Is
that true? I doubt it. If those people exist, why aren't they already
offering to co-maintain packages, or responding to some of those open
bugs?

A possible answer to that question could be that no-ones going to volunteer to do work that they assume someone else already has in hand.

Also, it's hard to volunteer to co-maintain a package which has a non-responsive maintainer, because there is no one to grant you access.  For simple packages that only require a minor version update, invoking and following through the non-responsive maintainer process is often more effort than the outstanding work required on the package.

-- 
Peter Oliver