Re: Reviving the LTS Discussions (ALT: A separate LTS branch)
GHC is an open source project. People work on it because 1. They enjoy it and find it interesting, 2. They need it to work well to support their own software, 3. They're trying to write a paper/get a degree/impress their peers, or, in very rare cases, 4. Someone pays them to do it. People are also willing to do some kinds of minor maintenance work because 5. They feel a sense of obligation to the community but this is not likely, on its own, to keep many people active. What does this have to do with LTS releases? The fact is that having people who want an LTS release does not necessarily mean that anyone else should do much of anything about it. If they don't really care, they're likely to half-build an LTS process and then get sidetracked. So what do I think should be done about this? I think "GHC headquarters" should make a standing offer to any person, group, or company interested in producing an LTS release: an offer of Trac, and Phabricator, and Harbormaster, and generally all the infrastructure that GHC already uses. Also an offer of advice on how to manage releases, deal with common issues, etc. But a promise of programming power seems likely to be an empty one, and I don't see the point of trying to push it. If someone wants an LTS release, they need to either make one themselves or pay someone to do the job.
Austin, thanks for starting this thread. I think David raises a lot of
very important points. In particular, I don't think an LTS plan can be
successful unless there's significant demand (probably from commercial
Haskell users), and it would almost certainly require that those users make
a commitment to do some of the work themselves.
I think David's suggestion is probably a good place to start. For that
matter, anyone who's interested could probably just fork the github repo,
pull in patches they want, and work away, but it does seem a bit nicer/more
efficient to be able to integrate with trac.
John
On Fri Nov 07 2014 at 11:45:34 PM David Feuer
GHC is an open source project. People work on it because
1. They enjoy it and find it interesting, 2. They need it to work well to support their own software, 3. They're trying to write a paper/get a degree/impress their peers, or, in very rare cases, 4. Someone pays them to do it. People are also willing to do some kinds of minor maintenance work because 5. They feel a sense of obligation to the community but this is not likely, on its own, to keep many people active.
What does this have to do with LTS releases? The fact is that having people who want an LTS release does not necessarily mean that anyone else should do much of anything about it. If they don't really care, they're likely to half-build an LTS process and then get sidetracked.
So what do I think should be done about this? I think "GHC headquarters" should make a standing offer to any person, group, or company interested in producing an LTS release: an offer of Trac, and Phabricator, and Harbormaster, and generally all the infrastructure that GHC already uses. Also an offer of advice on how to manage releases, deal with common issues, etc. But a promise of programming power seems likely to be an empty one, and I don't see the point of trying to push it. If someone wants an LTS release, they need to either make one themselves or pay someone to do the job. _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
participants (2)
-
David Feuer -
John Lato