[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining lambdabot

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:59 PM, Jan Stolarek <jan.stolarek at p.lodz.pl> wrote:
> Exactly. This allows to use and develop these packages independently of lambdabot and I consider
> that a Good Thing. I'm also much in favor of using git, because github allows easy collaboration
> between community members.

It may be a good thing, but speaking as the de facto maintainer of
lambdabot for the past few years, it's a very small good thing and the
goodness may be outweighed by the costs of switching: hardly anyone
ever sends in patches for lambdabot proper, and even fewer for those
add-on runtime dependencies.

I am reminded of a recent incident on the XMonad mailing list: an
enthusiastic young member proposed changing the entire infrastructure
to Github because Github is the new hotness and it would surely
promote easy collaboration between community members and so on and so
forth. He put in a bunch of work in making copies and converting repos
etc, and... nothing happened. His effort was wasted. Turns out the
reason for people not submitting patches had more to do with things
besides not being hosted on Github.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net