[Haskell-cafe] Re: Handling absent maintainers

[Ben Millwood]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 3:02 AM, Mark Wotton <mwotton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've uploaded haskell-src-meta-mwotton, using the development version.
> It seems to work fine for my applications. It's a bit of a hack, but I
> can't think of a better way to do it for now.
>
> mark
>
>
> --
> A UNIX signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of a
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>         -- Chris Maeda
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I've just come up against one of the drawbacks of this approach -
having needed haskell-src-meta for a personal project, I downloaded
the source and updated it to work with GHC 6.12, fixed various bits
and bobs, and only now found out that much of that work had already
been done elsewhere :)

Matt Morrow has been missing for a long time and I think it's
reasonable to suppose he won't suddenly spring out of the darkness to
fix things for us. I propose that someone just take up maintainership
of the package. I am quite willing to do this with my version, or Mark
if you think you'd like to keep a closer eye on your dependencies you
could do it instead.

I further propose that we should write up a haskellwiki page about
absent maintainers and what the community thinks is reasonable in
terms of attempting contact before assuming them missing, presumed
gone. This kind of depends also on how big an indignity we consider it
to be if someone updates a package while the maintainer is just on
holiday or something.

So we need to decide on: first, who will take haskell-src-meta, and
second, what we think is good as a more general policy. I would think
the process would go something like:
1. email maintainer, wait 2 weeks for reply
2. email cafe and maintainers of reverse dependencies with proposed
changes, wait a week or so for people who know the maintainer to show
up or other people to object to your changes
3. chomp package