On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 4:03 AM, Peter Simons
Anyway, this issue is beside the point I was trying to make. I am concerned about the lack of communication regarding the maintenance of [extra] and [community]. Whatever is going on in these repositories, the members of this list are not involved in the process even though we are directly affected by changes that occur in these places. This is not an ideal situation, and it already *did* cause a significant amount of trouble in the past.
Well, who on this list is even an Arch dev with access to [extra]? That would be Vesa and Rémy, who is now the primary maintainer I believe. Rémy is very active on the list, so I don't think it's quite accurate to characterize the problem as one of disconnectedness. Rather, one and a half people are responsible for maintaining a set of packages with sometimes cascading rebuilds required without, according to you, a more complete automatic way to check for consistency with the rest of the packages that we want to build against Haskell [extra]. As an aside: in the past few months, I have not really seen any issue take more than a couple of weeks to resolve with the average response time seeming more like a few days. So I am one person who thinks this aspect has noticeably improved (though obviously still not where you would like it to be). To summarize my main point, I would actually characterize this problem as a lack of people with access to [extra] who care about the Haskell packages or have the free time/resources to get a turnaround on issues consistently to a few days at most. With better tools, having only two devs would clearly be less of a blocker, but that's another part of your post. As far as the TUs who have been helping with [community], Xyne is always helpful and communicative on this list and the forums. While I'm not sure if Sergej has posted to the list, his ~1400 packages are very close to up-to-date and he's very responsive about updating when flagged out of date or making sure his haskell packages track HP (alex) or are updated. Please don't take this as me trying to dismiss your concerns. I am just trying to offer a counterpoint on this particular aspect as it seems an end user's perspective could be helpful too.