How would the automation work?  Automation in trust models is very very fiddly to get right.  Like really hard.  Like a research problem with reality consequences hard. 

At the end of the day, it's a people problem.  The best we can do is come up with a very audit able, publicly visible process that makes everything easy for 3rd partiies to audit.  And prevents / catches any abuse before it does something like break vector or ByteString. 

On Friday, January 31, 2014, Clark Gaebel <cgaebel@uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

There could be an email made to the relevant mailing lists during a takeover attempt. That way we get human visibility, human "veto power" if the email goes to libraries@, and automation when there are no objections.

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:09 PM, Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

Agreed.  It should not be automatic.  There should be lots of human visible interaction publicly going on.  

On Friday, January 31, 2014, Daniil Frumin <difrumin@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a problem with the 4th step. What if maintainer is unreachable,
but the updated version of the package is broken/breaking ever
dependency? What if there are several replacements awaiting?

I personally think that problem we are facing is not technical, but a
social one. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer trustees to the
automatic mechanism.

I understand that Roman may have been really irritated by the whole
process - but on the other hand, do we really need/want the process of
overtaking packages to be easy? I strongly align with Gershom's
position. We should make the process more transparent and visible. In
order to put my money where my mouth is,  I created a wiki page that
(hopefully) describes the process of taking over a package:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Taking_over_a_package
You are strongly encouraged to edit that page and give more details
(especially given my far from perfect English)

Maybe it is a good idea to have links to that wiki article on every
package page on Hackage?

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 8:44 PM, Carter Schonwald
<carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:
> Problem: no one is really actively working on hackage-server.  Are you
> volunteering? :-)
>
>
> On Friday, January 31, 2014, Clark Gaebel <cgaebel@uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>>
>> We could actually partially automate this:
>>
>> 1) Package maintainership switch is submitted online, with a new
>> replacement package, and perhaps a message.
>> 2) An email is sent to the maintainer with a link to either:
>>        - delete the replacement package
>>        - allow one-time upload
>>        - permanently add the uploader as a maintainer
>>        - permanently switch maintaners to the uploader
>> 3) While the package is in this limbo state waiting for a response from
>> the maintainer, put a link to the package at the bottom of the hackage page
>> in a new "suggested replacements" section. In this section, each candidate
>> replacement package is listed, along with its message and how long it's been
>> waiting.
>> 4) After a bikeshed-long amount of time with no response from the
>> maintainer (I'll suggest 1 month), the package is automatically updated to
>> the suggested version and the package uploader is added as a maintainer.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Daniil Frumin <difrumin@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think the proposed approach is only reasonable. However, I would
>>> like to stress that in any case it would be better to make sure that
>>> we give the maintainer enough time to respond, e.g.: if the maintainer
>>> is unreachable for a couple of weeks at least
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Erik Hesselink <hesselink@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> > On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 3:15 AM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma@ro-che.info>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >> * Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+hs@mega-nerd.com> [2014-01-31
>>> >> 09:22:36+1100]
>>> >>> I really can understand why you did this; I am frustrated by some of
>>> >>> the same issues. However, I think if any significant number of people
>>> >>> did this, the results could easily be disasterous.
>>> >>
>>> >> Agreed. Maybe we need those disasterous results to realize that the
>>> >> current process is bad and come up with a better one. Or maybe it's
>>> >> just
>>> >> me, and everyone else is happy (enough) with the process, so nothing
>>> >> will happen.
>>> >
>>> > That's a rather fatalist attitude, and als

--

Clark.

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