Proposal: Change to library proposal process

Wed Jan 5 14:14:59 CET 2011

On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 01:50:26PM +0100, Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Many of the changes proposed on Libraries are controversial, I haven't
> > counted but I expect uncontroversial (and accepted) changes are the
> > minority rather than the majority of proposals (successful recent
> > changes I can see from my inbox seem to be adding applicative
> > instances for ST where they were obviously missing or fleshing out
> > some of the Control.Concurrent modules).
> 
> Perhaps that's because no one would go through the trouble to propose
> smaller patches as the work reward ratio makes it not worth it?

The implication being that the reason no-one is submitting patches for
these widely used libraries is the process?

Taking the first few packages from:
    http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/popular-haskell-packages-q2-2010-report/

HTTP:
    As I understand it, Ganesh recently grudgingly became maintainer, as
    no-one else stepped up. 2 or 3 bug fixes in the last year. Diff:
    http://urchin.earth.li/~ian/HTTP.txt

parsec:
    3 small tweaks, and the Cabal file altered to cope with base 4, in
    the last 15 months. Diff:
    http://urchin.earth.li/~ian/parsec.txt

zlib:
    Not even an upload for the last 18 months.

binary:
    Not even an upload for the last 15 months.

None of those use the library process. Now here's the list of patches
for the unix package in the last year, which does use the process:

    Sat Jan  1 20:11:50 GMT 2011  Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li>
      * Proper autoconf test for sem_close's library; fixes trac #4523

    Fri Dec 10 09:46:45 GMT 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * run forkprocess01 with +RTS -ls too, to test #4512
      Ignore-this: 446a0f0b6057c58fc4a2f9d69fae33a1

    Wed Dec  8 18:38:49 GMT 2010  Dmitry Astapov <dastapov at gmail.com>
      * Clarify behavior of "awaitSignal Nothing", export SignalSet that includes all signals reserved by RTS (#4504)
      Ignore-this: 646a2af7fbed41ee3c72a624c6032db9

    Tue Nov 16 17:25:36 GMT 2010  simonpj at microsoft.com
      * Remove unnecessary fromIntegral calls
      Ignore-this: e77072c759445a64892738618ff03ea8

    Fri Sep 17 16:01:14 BST 2010  Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li>
      * Bump version to 2.4.1.0

    Thu Sep  9 13:54:59 BST 2010  Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk>
      * avoid Foreign.unsafePerformIO
      Ignore-this: 890c8460db98d1ec18168d70291be9f1

    Mon May 17 19:19:45 BST 2010  Eric Mertens <emertens at galois.com>
      * Add bindings for setting effective user-id and group-id
      Ignore-this: 49f72b40befb133cdbf63742a389dad5

      Having the ability to set the effective user-id and group-id
      enables the application to switch between the real user-id
      and set-user-id multiple times.

    Wed Jun  2 09:25:09 BST 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * Allow base-4.3
      Ignore-this: 5d6dea210a68d3f290f69ee1feb1488a

    Tue May 18 09:44:22 BST 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * add a comment about 3816 failing due to Samba
      Ignore-this: daf0c2087064925e67b1a5a09ce7632c

    Sun Apr 18 18:26:19 BST 2010  Matthias Kilian <kili at outback.escape.de>
      * Provide a dummy input file for queryfdoption01
      Ignore-this: 4d7bfb388193ff6090f4a5fcfe798bbe

    Fri Apr 30 09:28:41 BST 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * mention that forkProcess is not supported with +RTS -Nn where n > 1
      Ignore-this: c7bc7e8262bc72244061a9aba2dd468d

    Mon Mar 29 12:27:13 BST 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * make getAllGroupEntries work when called again; fixes #3816
      Ignore-this: 8b5e3c1d8648d556b9f032a198a8475d

    Mon Mar 29 12:26:46 BST 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * add test for #3816
      Ignore-this: 4d07e5956a5bc6dfb7be59473ccf6b98

    Mon Mar 22 13:16:15 GMT 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * fix warnings
      Ignore-this: 9fd97646b47d5d8d2957c0927885041e

    Fri Mar 19 21:08:02 GMT 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * handleToFd: close both sides of a DuplexHandle (#3914)
      Ignore-this: d1c17df79644a7ad140099d0c1474c81

    Wed Jan 27 11:46:00 GMT 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * check for EINTR in openFd
      Ignore-this: 28859b6a74c6d47d5c92db0eb688fa4c

    Wed Jan 27 11:43:29 GMT 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * accept --with-cc to set the path to gcc (#2966)
      Ignore-this: 127eccfccbfc849ce05aed5904d16b75

    Tue Jan 19 00:34:37 GMT 2010  gwern0 at gmail.com
      * System.Posix.Temp: rm whitespace
      Ignore-this: 33b2bcf99f7b6b21461ea0aee7c12ea8

    Tue Jan 19 00:30:22 GMT 2010  gwern0 at gmail.com
      * System.Posix.Temp: pad input filenames with 6 Xs
      Ignore-this: 1e5a45074881f75d58e3a0f02525b264
      If the argument doesn't terminate in capital Xs, the C mkstemp will simply bomb out
      with zero warning. This was not documented.
      By arbitrarily sticking a bunch of Xes at the end of all arguments, we guarantee that
      this exception will not be thrown, the type signature will not change, and no existing
      code can break (since if it was manually avoiding the exception by adding "XXX" itself,
      the temp files will now be simply 3 random characters longer, nothing worse).

    Tue Jan 19 00:27:55 GMT 2010  gwern0 at gmail.com
      * System.Posix.Temp: improve haddocks for mkstemp to explain what that returned String actually is
      Ignore-this: 5f5ec7871a687a024cda18b1b0d1e044

    Wed Jan 13 11:38:03 GMT 2010  Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
      * fix base dependency: should be >= 4.2 (#3780), and bump verison to 2.4.0.1
      Ignore-this: 121b61a9ea1ce1dcbe499285d1910d25

base's list would be more than 10 times as long.

Thanks
Ian