Re: [Haskell-cafe] Unmaintained packages and hackage upload rights

Because I can't release my package (which depends on the fixed version) immediately. Also, all sorts of psychological reasons (as Kim-Ee Yeoh said) — context switches, open loops etc. It's much better to just upload the package and be done with it. Roman * Clark Gaebel [2014-01-30 11:40:12-0500]

How does the process of taking over maintenance add latency to your work?

1) Check out broken version of package. 2) Fix locally, bump version number locally. 3) cabal sandbox add-source ../fixed-package in any package that needs the fixed version. 4) Email hackage admins for upload rights. 5) Continue working on your actual project. 6) Receive upload privileges one day. 7) Upload fixed package.

As far as I can tell, the only real latency cost here is that paid to fix the broken version.

Regards, - Clark

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:

...

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

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-- Clark.

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