[Haskell-cafe] Hackage checking maintainership of packages

[Sturdy, Ian]

Being in favor of not needlessly harassing people, even for a few minutes, I would favor issuing such emails only when there is some reason to believe that the package is not maintained. The two situations I can see that would justify such an email:
 - A dependency exceeds the upper bound listed in the cabal file.
 - It fails to build on the most recent GHC with its listed dependencies.

Every three months, issue one email per address listing packages that are in one of those conditions at the moment and have been for at least a week (or longer--I care little there).

I think this strikes a good balance between bothering people needlessly and doing nothing (although it does not properly catch unmaintained packages that build but with serious bugs; I welcome any automatic ways to determine that with reasonably low false positive rates).

--IRS