I want to ask a honest question: Who is GHC HQ? There is a page listing who is on - Haskell.org committee, - on core libraries committee (CLC), - GHC steering committee; - there is a list of named maintainers for core libraries, - and it is relatively easily to deduce who maintains other tools and libraries relevant to GHC (e.g. Cabal or say `shake` for hadrian). But who are in GHC HQ? Neither google nor gitlab.haskell.org search give any hints. --- I think the core issue here is bad or insufficient communication. GHC-8.12 beta release is planned to happen in three months. There are patches still in flight (e.g. for process, Cabal has tracking issue open). I'm sure that maintainers are able to ack on that. Maybe start by requiring these explicit acknowledgments? I also want to remind about first GHC-8.10 schedule posted on this list     October  18 2019:  start of one week freeze in preparation for branching     October  25 2019:  ghc-8.10 branch cut     November 8  2019:  8.10.1-alpha1     November 22 2019:  8.10.1-alpha2     December 6  2019:  8.10.1-alpha3     December 20 2019:  8.10.1-rc1     January  10 2020:  Final 8.10.1 release I haven't seen *any* updates to that. GHC-8.10.1 was released in end of March 2020, *three months later*, text issue was urgent in beginning of February. The plan for GHC-8.12 is to  * Mid-June 2020: Aim to have all major features in the tree  * Late-June 2020: Cut the ghc-8.12 branch  * June - August 2020: 3 alpha releases  * 1 September 2020: beta release  * 25 September 2020: Final 8.12.1 release are we still on track? What I'm trying to say, it is that it is hard to believe that issue is urgent for GHC. It's not the first time (relating to ghc-8.10) when schedules are not been kept. And this is one of reasons why I opened an issue about "Annual release cycle, its structure and long-term-support". - Oleg On 1.6.2020 12.23, Moritz Angermann wrote:

Hi there!

so this comes up periodically, and I think we need to discuss this. This is not related to anything right now, so if you wonder if I'm writing this because of something that just happened that I'm involved and you might have missed something, you probably did not. It came up on the #ghc IRC channel a few day ago.

GHC depends on quite a set of libraries, and ships those in releases. When ever a new GHC release is cut, all these dependencies need to be on hackage and have release versions. We do not want to produce a GHC release which depends on in-flight packages. In-flight might happen for example due to GHC having to patch dependencies to make them work with HEAD.

Everyone who maintains any kind of software online, knows that maintenance can be a drag, and then life happens, and what not. There are many very responsive maintainers and we all owe them a grate amount of gratitude towards their relentless work, keeping those libraries up to date and responding to questions, patches, ...

I therefore would like to float the following idea to make the GHC release processes a bit more reliable. GHCHQ (that is those in charge of producing GHC releases for us all), are made co-maintainers on each library GHC depends on, to guarantee that GHC can move forward in the worst of circumstances. Now I would hope that in almost all cases GHCHQ would never have to maintain any of the dependencies actively, they deal with GHC already, so let's try to keep it that way. However GHCHQ can, after a 14day notification period, exercise the co-maintainance and cut releases (and upload them to hackage), should the maintainer not be able to do so on his own for various reasons.

I'd like to see this as an insurance policy for GHC continuous development. The only alternative that I see would be that GHCHQ starts forking dependencies and initiates the hackage maintainer takeover protocol, which will cause additional delays, and incurs an extra burden on the GHC maintainers.

I hope we can all agree that libraries that end up being dependencies of GHC should be held in high regards and form the very foundation GHC is built upon. As such it should be an honour to have GHCHQ being a co-maintainer for ones library, as it signifies that importances of the library for the continuous development of GHC.

Again I don't expect much to change, except for GHCHQ becoming co-maintainers for libraries GHC depends on. The baseline expectation will remain as it is. However we will have ensured the frictionless development of GHC going forward.

Cheers, Moritz _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

Moritz Angermann writes:

Hi there!

Again I don't expect much to change, except for GHCHQ becoming co-maintainers for libraries GHC depends on. The baseline expectation will remain as it is. However we will have ensured the frictionless development of GHC going forward.

While I think this would indeed help and wouldn't mind seeing this idea implemented, last time it was floated there was quite some resistance from some maintainers. Really, I think the problems with core library maintenance that GHC feels are bigger than GHC. Afterall, if it takes weeks for a patch from the GHC release manager to make its way into a core library, it will almost certainly take the same time, if not longer, for a patch from a non-GHC contributor to be accepted. We see this in the large number of outstanding merge requests in some of the core library repositories. This isn't a problem that GHC can solve; the bus number for many of our core packages is simply too low. I think the way to fix this is to ensure that core libraries have a sufficiently large pool of maintainers that responsiveness is not a question. Of course, fixing this isn't easy. Our core libraries *need* to maintain a high standard of quality and enforcing that standard requires effort on the part of skilled maintainers. Finding maintainers who have the desire, time, and skill to fill this role is hard. That being said, I do feel that currently outside contributors don't feel welcome enough to even offer to help, largely *because* of the rather minimal maintenance that some core packages see. There is something of a chicken-and-egg problem here. I would also like to reiterate that the above doesn't describe all core libraries. Most of our core library maintainers are impressively responsive and this is something for which I am very grateful. Moreover, while I do believe that the discussion above points to a real problem, I want to make it very clear that all of our core library maintainers deserve recognition for the difficult role that they fill: hand-holding contributors, triaging tickets, reviewing merge requests is hard work and the success of our entire ecosystem rests of their efforts. The fact that Haskell has seen such growth in the past years is in large part the direct result of their work which has made Haskell such a joy to use. Cheers, - Ben