[Haskell-cafe] Re: Handling absent maintainers

Geoffrey Mainland mainland at eecs.harvard.edu
Thu Aug 19 00:40:10 EDT 2010


On 08/18/2010 02:25, Ben Millwood wrote:
> 2010/8/17 Geoffrey Mainland <mainland at eecs.harvard.edu>:
>> On 08/17/2010 12:28, Ben Millwood wrote:
>>> 2010/8/17 Jonas Almström Duregård <jonas.duregard at gmail.com>:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Has there been any progress with this package? Like you I have also
>>>> tried to contact Matt and like you I have ended up making my own
>>>> version of src-meta :). When someone assumes maintainership of this
>>>> package I would like to discuss integrating some additions I made to
>>>> the Translation module.
>>>>
>>>> /Jonas
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Jonas,
>>>
>>> Sorry about the delay. In my version of haskell-src-meta I basically
>>> replaced the entire Language.Haskell.TH.Instances.Lift module with
>>> derivations from the th-lift package whose latest version currently
>>> doesn't build [1]. I had been in contact with the maintainer of the
>>> package who has prepared a version 0.5 and was waiting for them to
>>> upload it so that I could use it as a dependency, but I haven't heard
>>> from them in a week or so. I'll try emailing them again, and as soon
>>> as 0.5 is on hackage I will go ahead with my upload.
>>>
>>> I suppose since there's no reason why I deserve maintainership more
>>> than you you could just go ahead and upload your version instead. You
>>> can see exactly what I've done at my github repository [2].
>>>
>>> Yours,
>>> Ben Millwood
>>>
>>> [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/th-lift-0.4
>>> [2] http://github.com/benmachine/haskell-src-meta
>>
>> I'm also waiting on a 6.12-compatible version of haskell-src-meta so I
>> can release a version of my package for quasiquoting C/CUDA. I pulled
>> Mark's changes to create a version that maintains compatibility with
>> version 2.3 of the template-haskell library (and therefore with GHC
>> 6.10). Is there any chance we can keep backwards-compatibility? ;) I'm
>> happy to help with patches and/or maintainership, of course.
>>
>> Geoff
>>
> 
> I imagine maintaining compatibility across template-haskell versions
> might be tricky. Prior to template-haskell-2.4.0.0, I believe there
> was no TH support for kinds, and class contexts were simply Types
> rebranded (not supporting equality constraints). So some
> not-inconsiderable sections of code would need duplication, or we'd
> need to deal with CPP which always struck me as a fragile and
> inelegant solution. Of course, I welcome the patches to prove me wrong
> :) or well, if you just want to take maintainership yourself, the
> package is really as much yours as it is mine at this stage.
> 
> Ben

I have patches that main compatibility with 6.10, but now that
haskell-src-meta depends of th-lift, which requires
template-haskell>=2.4, I think it's a lost cause. Versioning for
template-haskell makes things a real mess now---if I want a package
using haskell-src-meta to work on both 6.10 and 6.12, I basically have
to test the version of GHC being used and set package dependencies
appropriately. Unless someone has a better way?

Geoff



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