Call for GHC Maintainers

[Moritz Angermann]

Hi there!

As it stands right now, Ben is the one who works tirelessly trying to
cut releases. Not just for the most recent version, but also for
previous versions. Most recently 8.10.2, but we have 9.0 coming up as
well.

I know that there are some people who deeply care for personal or
professional reasons for older releases, 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, ... Some of
them have stacks of patches applied, or proprietary extensions. I'd
argue that most of those applied patches are backports of bug fixes
and rarely language features, as language features will break
compatibility (due to ghc, base, and other library versions anyway).

I would therefore like drum up a group of people who will take care
(ideally 2+ per release) of backporting and making minor partch
releases. This does not have to go on forever, but it would take much
needed load off of Ben to focus on what ever happens in ghc HEAD.

So what would this work actually look like? It would consist of
- going through the list of MRs and tagging those which are relevant
for backporting to a certain release.
- backport MRs where the MR does not cleanly apply.
- fixup any test-suite failures.
- agree on a date to cut/make the release.

This is not a permanent commitment. I hope we can attract more people
to the ghc release managers.

I'm looking forward to great many responses. And I'm sure Ben will be
able to help mentor us through cutting the first releases. I'll
volunteer to be part of the 8.6 branch maintainers for now.

Cheers,
 Moritz

PS: There is a slightly related discussion about release cadence and
versions and how other projects deal with this in this ticket:
https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/18222