[Haskell-cafe] Unmaintained packages and hackage upload rights

[Marc Weber]

I feel Duncan Coutts is right.
Just fixing deps could be done by anyone.

Bigger changes (design choices) about more complicated packages should
be done on forks till the maintainer replies or failed doing so for some
time.

However live must go on in such case, too. Thus forking seems to be the
best way to continue.

Then it should be possible to signal that there is an alternative
upstream for that possibly unmaintained package. Maybe a cabal field
such as

  improves-uppon:  other-package

If the maintainer replies it can be deprecated and upstream can be
merged easily.


There are different approaches, too. Eg github/bitbucket support
teams/organizations. Eg the haskell community could just start a
such a team which implies that all packages hosted there may be updated
be the community as well (unless there are special notes in the .cabal
file/readme).

Its not only about putting updated packages on hackage, also about
knowing where current upstream is (if others want to join its easy to
miss such a fork) - with a community bitbucket the new version could
just be a new branch ..

How well such works in the real world - no idea. In the Vim community
there are severall packages whose maintainers changed and where 2 to 3
people fix some small bugs occasionally.

Marc Weber