[Haskell-cafe] Hackage checking maintainership of packages

Jeremy Shaw jeremy at n-heptane.com
Mon May 6 07:10:13 CEST 2013


Yes -- being maintained, and have a lot of commit activity are not the
same thing. There are many simple libraries which do not require much
ongoing develop. They are designed to do something of limited scope,
and they only need to be updated when something breaks.

I have thought that a more interesting metric might be to send the
maintainer an email when their package stops building automatically on
hackage. Then assign some weight based on whether or not they fix
things, and how often.

- jeremy

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Niklas Hambüchen <mail at nh2.me> wrote:
> I don't think that activity in the repo has too much to do with
> something being maintained.
>
> Maintainance is a thing humans commit to, so the question of whether
> something is maintained should be a question to a human.
>
> I often push a quick build failure fix for my packages, some of which I
> would still in not want to call "maintained".
>
> On Mon 06 May 2013 10:57:49 SGT, Clark Gaebel wrote:
>> If there's a github link in the package url, it could check the last
>> update to the default branch. If it's more than 6 months ago, an email
>> to the maintainer of "is this package maintained?" can be sent. If
>> there's no reply in 3 months, the package is marked as unmaintained.
>> If the email is ever responded to or a new version is uploaded, the
>> package can be un-marked.
>>   - Clark
>> On Sunday, May 5, 2013, Lyndon Maydwell wrote:
>>
>>     I've got it!
>>
>>     The answer was staring us in the face all along... We can just
>>     introduce backwards-compatibility breaking changes into GHC-head
>>     and see if the project fails to compile for x-time! That way we're
>>     SURE it's unmaintained.
>>
>>     I'll stop sending emails now.
>>
>>
>>     On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Clark Gaebel
>>     <cgaebel at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>>
>>         If there's a github link in the package url, it could check
>>         the last update to the default branch. If it's more than 6
>>         months ago, an email to the maintainer of "is this package
>>         maintained?" can be sent. If there's no reply in 3 months, the
>>         package is marked as unmaintained. If the email is ever
>>         responded to or a new version is uploaded, the package can be
>>         un-marked.
>>
>>           - Clark
>>
>>
>>         On Sunday, May 5, 2013, Lyndon Maydwell wrote:
>>
>>             But what if the package is already perfect?
>>
>>             Jokes aside, I think that activity alone wouldn't be a
>>             good indicator.
>>
>>
>>             On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Conrad Parker
>>             <conrad at metadecks.org> wrote:
>>
>>                 On 6 May 2013 09:42, Felipe Almeida Lessa
>>                 <felipe.lessa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>                 > Just checking the repo wouldn't work.  It may still
>>                 have some activity
>>                 > but not be maintained and vice-versa.
>>
>>                 ok, how about this: if the maintainer feels that their
>>                 repo and
>>                 maintenance activities are non-injective they can
>>                 additionally provide
>>                 an http-accessible URL for the maintenance activity.
>>                 Hackage can then
>>                 do an HTTP HEAD request on that URL and use the
>>                 Last-Modified response
>>                 header as an indication of the last time of
>>                 maintenance activity. I'm
>>                 being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but actually this would
>>                 allow you to
>>                 point hackage to a blog as evidence of maintenance
>>                 activity.
>>
>>                 I like the idea of just pinging the code repo.
>>
>>                 Conrad.
>>
>>                 > On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Doug Burke
>>                 <dburke.gw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>                 >>
>>                 >> On May 5, 2013 7:25 AM, "Petr Pudlák"
>>                 <petr.mvd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>> Hi,
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>> on another thread there was a suggestion which
>>                 perhaps went unnoticed by
>>                 >>> most:
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>                 >>>> From: Niklas Hambüchen <mail at nh2.me>
>>                 >>>> Date: 2013/5/4
>>                 >>>> ...
>>                 >>>> I would even be happy with newhackage sending
>>                 every package maintainer a
>>                 >>>> quarterly question "Would you still call your
>>                 project X 'maintained'?"
>>                 >>>> for each package they maintain; Hackage could
>>                 really give us better
>>                 >>>> indications concerning this.
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>> This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could
>>                 be as simple as "If you
>>                 >>> consider yourself to be the maintainer of package
>>                 X please just hit reply
>>                 >>> and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd
>>                 just would display some
>>                 >>> red text like "This package seems to be
>>                 unmaintained since D.M.Y."
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>> Best regards,
>>                 >>> Petr
>>                 >>>
>>                 >>
>>                 >> For those packages that give a repository, a query
>>                 could be done
>>                 >> automatically to see when it was last updated. It's
>>                 not the same thing as
>>                 >> 'being maintained', but is less annoying for those
>>                 people with many packages
>>                 >> on hackage.
>>                 >>
>>                 >> Doug
>>                 >>
>>                 >>
>>                 >> _______________________________________________
>>                 >> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>>                 >> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>>                 >> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>>                 >>
>>                 >
>>                 >
>>                 >
>>                 > --
>>                 > Felipe.
>>                 >
>>                 > _______________________________________________
>>                 > Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>>                 > Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>>                 > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>>
>>                 _______________________________________________
>>                 Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>>                 Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>>                 http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list