In the recent past I took over two unmaintained packages: bert and ansi-terminal. I don't mind spending a bit of time to keep our ecosystem from bitrotting. However, both times I had to go through an irritating procedure of contacting hackage admins, asking them to grant me upload rights, explaining why the maintainers can't do that themselves and why I think the packages are abandoned. Instead of a feeling that I'm doing something good and useful, I have a feeling that I'm bothering people with my own problems. It also adds unnecessary latency to my work. So from now on I'll simply fork the packages I need to fix. Others are of course welcome to use my forks. (This email was prompted by regex-tdfa which doesn't build on GHC 7.8, and whose maintainer hasn't responded. My fork is at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/regex-tdfa-rc .) Roman