Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Handling absent maintainers

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Ben Millwood wrote:

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 3:02 AM, Mark Wotton wrote:

...

I've uploaded haskell-src-meta-mwotton, using the development version. It seems to work fine for my applications. It's a bit of a hack, but I can't think of a better way to do it for now.

mark

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I've just come up against one of the drawbacks of this approach - having needed haskell-src-meta for a personal project, I downloaded the source and updated it to work with GHC 6.12, fixed various bits and bobs, and only now found out that much of that work had already been done elsewhere :)

Matt Morrow has been missing for a long time and I think it's reasonable to suppose he won't suddenly spring out of the darkness to fix things for us. I propose that someone just take up maintainership of the package. I am quite willing to do this with my version, or Mark if you think you'd like to keep a closer eye on your dependencies you could do it instead.

I further propose that we should write up a haskellwiki page about absent maintainers and what the community thinks is reasonable in terms of attempting contact before assuming them missing, presumed gone. This kind of depends also on how big an indignity we consider it to be if someone updates a package while the maintainer is just on holiday or something.

So we need to decide on: first, who will take haskell-src-meta, and second, what we think is good as a more general policy. I would think the process would go something like: 1. email maintainer, wait 2 weeks for reply 2. email cafe and maintainers of reverse dependencies with proposed changes, wait a week or so for people who know the maintainer to show up or other people to object to your changes 3. chomp package

I'm happy to let you do it, I don't understand much of the actual source. Not sure who's the grand gatekeeper of Hackage, though. Might it be possible to enable multiple maintainers on packages, each of whom can upload new versions? As far as I can tell, that's not currently possible with Cabal. mark -- A UNIX signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of a black velvet clown painting. It's a rectangle of carets surrounding a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who.         -- Chris Maeda