[Haskell-cafe] Unmaintained packages and hackage upload rights

[Ben Gamari]

Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> writes:

> In the recent past I took over two unmaintained packages: bert and
> ansi-terminal. I don't mind spending a bit of time to keep our ecosystem
> from bitrotting.
>
> However, both times I had to go through an irritating procedure of
> contacting hackage admins, asking them to grant me upload rights,
> explaining why the maintainers can't do that themselves and why I think
> the packages are abandoned.
>
> Instead of a feeling that I'm doing something good and useful, I have
> a feeling that I'm bothering people with my own problems. It also adds
> unnecessary latency to my work.
>
> So from now on I'll simply fork the packages I need to fix.
>
> Others are of course welcome to use my forks.
>
> (This email was prompted by regex-tdfa which doesn't build on GHC 7.8,
> and whose maintainer hasn't responded. My fork is at
> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/regex-tdfa-rc .)
>
I have also tried to upstream GHC 7.8 fixes to this package to no
avail. However, the maintainer did inform me that the darcs repository
is here[1].

It would be great if someone (it could be me, Roman, or anyone else
interested) would take over the regex-tdfa package itself. While the
forking idea certainly eliminates a lot of effort for the fork-er, it
would be nice if the original point in the namespace were inhabited by
an actively maintained package. I feel like an explosion of forks gives
a not-so-great impression of the Haskell community and makes it even
harder for beginners to find the right packages to depend upon.

Concerning the friction imposed by the package take-over process, I
agree that it is rather onerous. In my opinion the protocol is a bit
too thorough for its own good.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] http://code.haskell.org/regex-tdfa/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 489 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20140130/65e31c23/attachment.sig>