[Haskell-cafe] Hackage checking maintainership of packages

[Clark Gaebel]

Deepseq comes to mind regarding a "perfect" package that doesn't require
active maintenance.

  - Clark


On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Petr Pudlák <petr.mvd at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2013/5/6 Tillmann Rendel <rendel at informatik.uni-marburg.de>
>
>> Petr Pudlák wrote:
>>
>>      ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>     From: *Niklas Hambüchen* <mail at nh2.me <mailto: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."
>>>
>>
>> I like the idea of displaying additional info about the status of package
>> development, but I don't like the idea of annoying hard-working package
>> maintainers with emails about their perfect packages that actually didn't
>> need any updates since ages ago.
>>
>
> I understand, but replying to an email with an empty body or clicking on a
> link once in a few months doesn't seem to be an issue for me. And if
> somebody is very busy and doesn't update the package, it's more fair to
> signal from the start that (s)he doesn't want to maintain the package.
>
> Personally it happened to me perhaps several times that I used a promising
> package and discovered later that's it's not being maintained. I'd say that
> the amount of time required to confirm if authors maintain their packages
> is negligible compared to the amount of time people lose this way.
>
> Just out of curiosity, do you have some examples of such packages, that
> are being maintained, but not updated since they're near perfect? I'd like
> to know if this is a real issue. It seems to me
>
>
>>
>> So what about this: Hackage could try to automatically collect and
>> display information about the development status of packages that allow
>> potential users to *guess* whether the package is maintained or not.
>> Currently, potential users have to collect this information themselves.
>>
>> Here are some examples I have in mind:
>>
>>  * Fetch the timestamp of the latest commit from the HEAD repo
>>  * Fetch the number of open issues from the issue tracker
>>  * Display reverse dependencies on the main hackage page
>>  * Show the timestamp of the last Hackage upload of the uploader
>>
>> Tillmann
>>
>
> Those are good ideas. Some suggestions:
>
> I think we already have the timestamp of each upload, this already gives
> some information. Perhaps we could add a very simple feature saying how
> long ago that was and adding a warning color (like yellow if more than a
> year and red if more than two years).
>
> Reverse dependencies would certainly help a lot, but it works only for
> libraries, not for programs. (Although it's less likely that someone would
> search hackage for programs.)
>
> The problem with issue trackers is that (a) many packages don't have one,
> (b) there are many different issue trackers.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Petr
>
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