Hi Magnus,
To conclude, I'm perfectly all right with your comments and questions above, however from your tone I'm getting the feeling that are irritated with me.
personally, I would prefer to describe my impressions as concern. The reasons for my concern are simple. For the longest time, Don Steward has been the driving force behind the ArchHaskell project, and he has done an incredible job at bringing Haskell to ArchLinux. Over the course of the last year, however, it had become increasingly obvious that he alone cannot succeed at maintaining a set of 2,000 packages all on his own. It's just too much work for a single person, no matter how smart or enthusiastic he or she is. Last October, Don stepped down and handed the project over to a small group of people, namely you, Remy, and myself. Now, Remy has stated right from the start that he doesn't see himself maintaining HABS. Instead, he expressed an interest in continuing the development of the ArchLinux library and the cabal2arch utility, and that is exactly what he has done since. Considering that Remy is also our main go-to guy when it comes to [extra], I believe it's fair to say that he has been a major contributor of the project, even though he didn't contribute to HABS itself. Anyway, that leaves HABS firmly in the hands of two people: you and me. Unfortunately, it turned out that you didn't manage to contribute anything to the HABS repository in the entire period between October 22nd and yesterday. No updates, no bugfixes, no commits at all. Please don't get me wrong. I don't want to come across as criticizing you for the fact that you didn't have time to contribute! Still, the reality is that after Don's retirement, I am pretty much the only person who has committed time and resources to the maintenance of HABS. So this leaves us in a situation where the Haskell packages published on AUR are maintained by a single person again, only this time it's not Don, it's me. Duh! I didn't want that to happen, and I don't believe that I can keep 2,000 packages up-to-date any more than Don could. In the last two days, you've suddenly become extremely active again, and I can guess what the reasons for that unexpected burst of motivation were, but I wonder whether it is going to last? Are you sure that you can keep that level of activism up for the next 3 months? Are you certain that you have the time to commit to that?
Here's my "process" for updating packages on AUR:
1. Pull down any changes to my local copy of the HABS tree. 2. Open a clean chroot and bind-mount HABS and some personal tools into it. 3. Get the URL for the package that needs updating. 4. Run `cabal2arch <URL>` in the HABS top-level. 5. Switch to the chroot and build the updated package and it's dependencies (I have a simple shell script that does this) 6. If the build fails, then revert the changes to the package in HABS. 7. Go back to 2 and update another package. 8. When no more packages need updating, build the source packages for all modified packages. 9. Use aurploader to upload the source packages to AUR.
The problem with this is that step 5 can take a VERY long time, and sometimes I end up doing unnecessary work because there's no easy way of ordering the packages I'm updating such that the number of builds are minimised.
In http://github.com/peti/arch-haskell, I have automated that entire procedure so that boils down to running "make world". There is also a target "make updates" that will identify and print out all available updates from Hackage. Then I use "make publish" to upload the newly generated binary repository to the kiwilight.com server. The target "make src" will generate a whole bunch of taurballs that can be published on AUR using the aurupload utility. The set of packages that is being built is determined by this file: http://github.com/peti/arch-haskell/blob/master/PKGLIST I hope this helps! Take care, Peter