[C2hs] Looking for a new maintainer

[Ian Ross]

Dear all,

I've been maintaining C2HS since July 2013, and I'd now like to spend my
"Haskell time" on something else.  That means that I'm looking for someone
to take over C2HS maintenance.

The project is mature, the code is pretty clean (especially where I've not
touched it!) and has relatively infrequent issues arising, but there is one
*big* job that needs to be done to make C2HS viable in the long term, and
anyone who takes over maintenance needs to know about this.

Bug reports for C2HS mostly fall into three categories: feature requests,
"real" bugs in the logic of C2HS (fixing these varies in difficulty a lot),
and finally problems caused by the C compilers and associated header files
moving ahead of the language-c library that C2HS uses for parsing C
headers.  This third class of issues is the problem.  We have been making
piecemeal fixes to language-c to deal with some of these issues, but
language-c was only ever intended as a parser for C99 (plus some GNU
extensions), so it's falling over more and more often on C11 features that
are cropping up.  It's also not actively maintained, although the
maintainer (Benedikt Huber) is happy to accept patches.

The solution to this problem is to move C2HS over to using one of the other
C parsing libraries that are actively maintained and that support more
recent C dialects -- language-c-quote or language-c-inline, for example.
This is the "big job": all the AST types are different between the
different parsing libraries, and language-c contains some syntactic and
type analysis features used by C2HS that would need to be ported to
whatever new parsing library was used.  We have some ideas how to do this
in a minimally painful way, but it's still going to be a bit of a slog.

On the positive side, although it's a big job, C2HS has reasonable test
infrastructure in place to help -- there's a pretty extensive test suite,
and a VM-based regression suite that does test builds of a number of
packages that use C2HS (some of these run on Travis too).

If you're interested in taking over maintenance of C2HS, feel free to drop
me a line with any questions.

Cheers,

Ian.

-- 
Ian Ross   Tel: +43(0)6804451378   ian at skybluetrades.net
www.skybluetrades.net
PGP Key: 0x04490CC0/F4D6 027F 2661 745C 83A5  297D FCCC 0AE6 0449 0CC0
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