[Haskell-cafe] Package Takeover: `toml`

[Emily Pillmore]

Fwiw, I agree with the notion that "belonging to the community" is tricky, and entitled to a certain degree. That being said (and this might be where there is confusion in terms of what everyone believes or doesn't believe surround the subject), I think a diversity of projects that answer a particular need is better than a single monolithic choice.

For example, I also work on the `waargonaut` series of libraries which offer an alternative solution to JSON in contrast to `aeson`: a succinct zipper-based approach to parsing which is faster in some cases than the one used in `aeson`, and the controversial stance that deriving JSON schema is an anti-pattern. And despite there being contention in that last point, the succinct-zipper approach has led many to choose it for streaming JSON, and we've been able to POC improvements to the `aeson` parser based on things we've done in `waargonaut`. By no means will `waargonaut` ever be the blessed choice, but it is still useful and valuable just for existing and trying something different.

So in my mind, at least, competition is friendly and doesn't dilute any particular market share if it's significantly different. At the very least, I'd like to at least not have `toml` in its current state appear as a viable candidate in the list of hackage packages without being more up to date and presenting a sound choice, if not the most ideal. And i'm perfectly happy with saying "Hey, Tom got here first, c'est la vie" and helping him renovate the library if he's just looking at modernizing the existing code! This doesn't really entail kicking anyone out or blessing any package in particular. It's more janitorial to me.

- E

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 1:02 PM, amindfv--- < haskell-cafe at haskell.org > wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 11:50:06AM +0000, Tom Ellis wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 12:36:16PM +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, 11 Mar 2021, amindfv--- via Haskell-Cafe wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Again, trying to be respectful here, but "burning" kinda does imply
>>>> "fire," and "need" certainly does imply "need." It's now seeming more just
>>>> like a desire for the package name.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I have nothing to do with 'toml' but the many takeover requests in the
>>> recent past make me nervous that if I am away from Haskell programming for
>>> some weeks or months brings me in danger of losing my packages. Btw. for
>>> some years I was not subscribed to Haskell Cafe because of high traffic
>>> and I would have missed such takeover request. I think the preference
>>> should be to create a fork.
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> This raises an interesting question: to whom does the entry in the package
>> namespace belong? There's a tacit assumption that it belongs to the first
>> person who registered it. Arguably though it could be deemed to belong to
>> the community. The more "generic" the name the more water that argument
>> seems to hold.
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> As I said earlier, I'm open to this line of reasoning if there's a clear
> winner in terms of mindshare and functionality. As it is there are
> multiple popular, relatively mature packages, and the request was to give
> the name to a project which doesn't yet exist except in stub form.
> 
> 
> 
> "Belonging to the community" is a tricky concept, too - imagine the
> community speaks and declares tomland the winner, and tomland gets moved
> to the 'toml' namespace. Then, a couple years down the line, people find
> they want streaming parsing and in the meantime Carter and Emily have
> written great code. Do we then kick The Package Formerly Known As Tomland
> out of the 'toml' spot and put an entirely different project there? That's
> quite a breaking change for people with 'toml' in their .cabal files.
> 
> 
> 
> For what it's worth, my rewrite isn't a whole-cloth reimagning but instead
> is a fairly straightforward modernization of the existing 'toml' code.
> 
> 
> 
> Tom
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