Policy for taking over a package on Hackage

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Wed May 25 19:58:37 CEST 2011


On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 10:01:40PM +1000, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
[...]
> This situation also arose last year [1], and was resolved by someone
> volunteering to take over a package.  However, no formal policy was
> set in place (despite one being proposed).  As such, I'd like to
> propose the following policy based upon the one Ben Millwood
> proposed last time on how to take over maintainership of a package
> that hasn't been updated for a while:
> 
> 1. Email the current listed maintainer and wait a specified period
> of time (e.g. 2 weeks).
> 2. Email haskell-cafe, explicitly CC'ing maintainers of reverse
> dependencies (at least those that are themselves still active) and
> request permission to take over.  This way, people who know the
> maintainer might point out that they are indeed still around, etc.
> 3. If no-one objects within another two weeks, announce that you
> have taken over maintainership with a new email (in case people are
> ignoring the previous thread).
> 4. Upload a point release of the previous package (assuming it follows
> the PVP) with yourself as the new maintainer (just to get it out
> there).  Alternatively, if you already have a new version ready to go
> then upload that.

No matter what the time limit for a response is, there is a risk
that the original maintainer has a very valid reason for not
responding in time.  E.g. there are many countries where vacations of
more than 2 weeks is common, health issues, etc.  So is it worth
considering a revert-to-previous-maintainer clause as well?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus


Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then
being a real problem in the longer term.
     -- Alan Kay
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