haskell/bytestring stalled?

Wed Dec 18 23:42:39 UTC 2019

Thanks for bringing up this issue, Fumiaki!

Your email prompted me to review a few PRs today:

* [#155], which hadn't received a review since it it was opened a year
and 9 months ago, promptly got new commits from its author, M
Farkas-Dyck! :)

* In [#151], which promises rather impressive performance
improvements, the author Sergey Vinokurov reacted understandably
disappointed to my requests for more benchmark results, after his PR
had gone unacknowledged for 1 year and 10 months.

I think #151 demonstrates how unresponsive maintenance hurts a project
– contributors are disappointed by the lack of response and lose their
motivation to finish their work. Potential contributors are
discouraged when they see that existing PRs aren't getting merged.

Moreover, I believe that when core libraries like bytestring get into
such a sad state, it hurts the appearance of and users' confidence
into the Haskell ecosystem as a whole.

I don't blame Herbert or Duncan (CC'd) for not putting more work into
bytestring – I'm thankful for all their amazing work for the Haskell
ecosystem. But my impression is that both have far more (maintenance
and other) responsibilities than available time for unpaid open source
work. So I hope that they will allow others to help repair the current
situation and get bytestring onto a more sustainable base.

I would also like to ask Duncan, the official maintainer, whether he
intends to become more active again in this project or whether he
might be interested in passing the maintainer hat to someone with more
available time for this project. I'm asking because there are at least
two PRs that seem to be ready to go, except they're waiting for a
review from him:

* [#121] has been waiting for his review for 1 year and 10 months.
* [#132] has been waiting for his review for at least 1 year and 11 months.

Right now I believe it would be good to have a maintainer with the
available time to shepherd some new contributors like Fumiaki or me.
Since I admittedly don't trust Duncan and Herbert to have that time, I
wonder whether someone else, for example from GHC HQ, could get the
commit bits. I know that Ben Gamari (CC'd) has requested them for
other reasons [1].

It's clear that there are several people interested in helping to
maintain and improve bytestring – theindigamer15 (CC'd) offered his
help this February in an email that never got an official response
[2]. But as long as PRs are unlikely to get merged, there's no point
in opening or reviewing one.

Cheers,
Simon

[1] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devops-group/2019-July/000322.html
[2] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2019-February/130705.html
[#121] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/121
[#132] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/132
[#151] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/151
[#155] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/155

Am Mi., 18. Dez. 2019 um 10:40 Uhr schrieb Herbert Valerio Riedel
<hvriedel at gmail.com>:
>
> Hello Fumiaki,
>
> Bytestring is a fundamental library which is used by almost everyone, so its goal is first and foremost to be stable and reliable; hence its maintenance is generally very conservative and slow-paced; it's better this way than to risk introducing regressions. But also, 6 months without visible feedback for a library that's generally considered mature isn't something to be alarmed about either. I for one cycle through the projects I maintain when time permits (usually on weekends) and try to reduce the context switches by working for several hours on a single project, eventually resulting in a new release. This batched mode of operation also means that it takes some time to complete an orbit around all projects and I don't consider this a bad thing; In fact, I don't subscribe to the release early and often poorly paradigm anymore after having exercised it myself as producer as well as experienced it as consumer for a couple decades and I've been burned too many time by careless rushed releases (both by myself as well as others). Maybe I'm just getting older and wiser.
>
> That being said, if you or others want to help out with projects I (co)maintain such as `bytestring`, please get into contact with me. There are things you can do to help with the review of PRs and other tasks that benefit from as many hands or eyes as possible and which would reduce the workload during the focused batch-phase when the careful dedicated release processes is initiated.
>
> -- Herbert
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 9:48 AM Fumiaki Kinoshita <fumiexcel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I noticed that issues and PRs on bytestring repository[0] have received no feedback in past 6 months. Does anyone know what's going on? If I can help moving things along, I definitely would like to.
>>
>> [0] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring
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