'temporary' package

[Edward Kmett]

Frankly, even 2-3 week turnaround can often be too tight. I would caution
us to err very highly on the side of caution.

Many package maintainers do not upgrade to the latest and greatest GHC.
Some will stick to platform releases. I want more and more of the Haskell
ecosystem to work with GHC 7.8, but I don't expect it all to until after
there is a platform release that contains it.

I have some developers who shove me patches to support GHC 7.9, some that I
take as I can, but some I would have to take them blindly and will not be
correct for 7.9 as it exists in a few months, but only as it exists now.
Should we hold those to the same timetable?

Even by these extended "2-3 week" terms both Ross and Bryan would be
dealing with forks / reclaiming their packages and both are fairly active
members of our community, wonderful contributors whose gears merely mesh
with everyone else's intermittently.

The pain of a false positive far exceeds the cost of waiting longer.

If we're going to enshrine this in policy, I'd really only feel comfortable
with something like a hard 6 month no-response rule, after multiple contact
attempts, and that the issue should be something that is clearly affecting
a released platform.

That is long enough that it is obvious that the maintainer is disconnected,
and where the moral balance has *clearly* shifted to the community good.

If someone wants to go through the pain of maintaining some kind of
registry for maintainers to opt-in to a tighter timeline then by all means
do so, but I far prefer an inclusive approach that allows maintainers to go
do other things for a while.

If you feel the need is pressing, you *can* fork, but forks that smash the
same namespace do drive fragmentation in the community, so I'd plead with
folks to do so with caution.

-Edward Kmett


On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 8:11 PM, Gershom Bazerman <gershomb at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I understand that Max did a bunch of very important work, then became
> > occupied with other things in the world. And in the long term, that
> needs to
> > be sorted out. But in the short term, a four-day-notice policy is silly.
> And
> > furthermore, even though there's nothing _wrong_ with forking
> promiscuously,
> > it tends to create a mess, to no good end.
>
> Just a small note since this was mentioned a couple of times: as
> hackage admins we don't have a 'four-day-notice policy'. The package
> takeover procedure [0] just says 'a while', and we've taken this to
> mean at least 2-3 weeks to account for vacations, other absences,
> general busyness etc.
>
> Erik
>
> [0] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Taking_over_a_package
> _______________________________________________
> Libraries mailing list
> Libraries at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
>
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