Package spam :-)

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.06.20 17:06:28 +0100, Adrian Hey <ahey at iee.org> scribbled 1.2K characters:
> Hello Jean-Philippe
>
> Jean-Philippe Bernardy wrote:
>> * I have no time to maintain collections. As Adrian said before, this
>> is an unpaid, thankless job.
>
> I suspect Gwern Branwen feels the same way after all this :-)

I'm used to it. And this sort of thing is easier than a lot of Haskell-related stuff (I would freeze in stark terror if asked to try to write something like Edward's category library), after all. And I got used to being yelled at on Wikipedia and Usenet. :)

> Maybe it would be a good idea to do a 0.4 release for the benefit of
> anyone interested (0.3 did have some users I believe), especially as
> the 0.3 release seems to have disappeared (not sure why that is).
>
> But it would be good to get the dependencies right and make sure we
> don't have multiple sources for "the same" code.
>
> AFAIK enumset isn't in hackage at all at the moment and it may well be
> useful to someone, but is what's in the collections repository the
> latest official version or is it being worked on elsewhere?

I agree. But what do we need to do for a cleaned up release?

* I think we obviously need to remove you from the various maintainer fields. You seem to be in ~half of them:

gwern at craft:11210~/bin/collections-ghc6.8>grep maintainer: `find . -name "*.cabal"|grep -v _darcs`                    [ 2:06AM]
./collections.cabal:maintainer:     jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./Data-Tree-AVL/dist/Data-Tree-AVL-0.4/Data-Tree-AVL.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png
./Data-Tree-AVL/Data-Tree-AVL.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png
./Data-COrdering/dist/Data-COrdering-0.4/Data-COrdering.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png
./Data-COrdering/Data-COrdering.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png
./Data-Trie-General-OrdGT/dist/Data-Trie-General-OrdGT-0.4/Data-Trie-General-OrdGT.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png
./Data-Trie-General-OrdGT/Data-Trie-General-OrdGT.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png
./collections-base-instances/collections-base-instances.cabal:maintainer: jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./collections-base-instances/dist/collections-base-instances-0.4/collections-base-instances.cabal:maintainer: jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./collections-rangedsets-instances/collections-rangedsets-instances.cabal:maintainer: jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./collections-api/collections-api.cabal:maintainer:     jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./collections-api/dist/collections-api-0.4/collections-api.cabal:maintainer: jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./enumsets/enumsets.cabal:maintainer:     jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./enumsets/dist/enumsets-0.4/enumsets.cabal:maintainer: jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./collections-avl/dist/collections-avl-0.4/collections-avl.cabal:maintainer: jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./collections-avl/collections-avl.cabal:maintainer:     jeanphilippe.bernardy (google mail)
./Data-Trie-General/Data-Trie-General.cabal:maintainer: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/em.png

* Then I think the next step would be to remove whatever you've forked from the collections repo, & change the dependencies to depend on yours. But this assumes, I guess, that your versions haven't diverged too awfully far for the dependencies to fail. (So which ones are you maintaining, again?)

> With regard to the maintenance state of packages in hackage, I think
> it's  fine to have dead/dormant/"looking for new owner" packages
> archived there, just so long as it's clear to users that this is the
> case (anyone who finds it useful enough to care about it's maintainance
> can always take over ownership if they want).

See my other email. To expand on my thoughts there, Hackage could add a warning if there is no maintainer field, show a maintainer entry on the webpage anyway but with the default author being one Mr. "Unmaintained".

On a side note, I happened to run all my local repositories through find/grep, and I see that there are two examples of "maintainer: none"! Which supports my contention about variants, and I will amusedly note, outweighs the single usage of "maintainer: Unmaintained".

> As it happens I think I probably will keep maintaining the AVL stuff
> after all as the generalised tries package Jamie Brandon is working
> on will probably have a dependency on it.
>
> Regards
> --
> Adrian Hey

--
gwern
DI VIP J2 AFSPC detection STEEPLEBUSH DES chosen DDR&E RUOP
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