[Haskell-cafe] haskell-src-exts maintenance

[Neil Mitchell]

As a very heavy HSE user (HLint and Hoogle), who has had a reasonably
close working relationship with all of Niklas (my SoC mentor and my
SoC mentee), Roman and Peter (a fellow supercompiler developer) and
Matt (currently hacking on HLint), I thought I should weigh in.

The current state of HSE is a little forlorn - there are 22 open pull
requests, everything from reducing algorithm complexity (an accidental
n^3), fixing the default encoding (should be UTF8) and lots of actual
parser fixes. A lot of this is good stuff, and the high level of
external contributions is a really good sign. But they need to be
merged and reviewed, and it seems the bandwidth just isn't there at
the moment. Given Matt's comments on the existing tickets, and the
triage he's already performing on the repo, I have high hopes that
Matt could provide a bit more of the time and attention. Peter,
perhaps a co-maintainer would be good for a little while?

> If it's not soon then please could you add myself and Christian to the
> maintainers so that we can perform some short term maintenance.  My
> immediate plan of action would be
>
> 1. Immediately cut a 1.17 release from the master branch as it
> contains much better parsing of lifted constructors which are becoming
> more prevalent.
> 2. Review and merge recent pull requests.
> 3. Update the parser as far as possible with missing features.
> 4. Release 1.18 with these improvements within 1 month.

Awesome! Although as a preference I'd go for as much of 2 as you can
in a couple of days before doing 1 - a lot of the patches are simple
and valuable, and a 2 day wait isn't going to be too problematic.

Thanks, Neil