[Haskell-cafe] Unmaintained packages and hackage upload rights

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com> [2014-01-30 11:49:37-0500]
> 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/

Here's my git repo (imported from that repository + my patches):
https://github.com/feuerbach/regex-tdfa-rc

If anyone eventually takes over, feel free to use it (the renaming
commits are easy to strip).

Roman
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