[Haskell-cafe] Re: Handling absent maintainers

On 08/18/2010 02:25, Ben Millwood wrote:

2010/8/17 Geoffrey Mainland :

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On 08/17/2010 12:28, Ben Millwood wrote:

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2010/8/17 Jonas Almström Duregård :

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Hi,

Has there been any progress with this package? Like you I have also tried to contact Matt and like you I have ended up making my own version of src-meta :). When someone assumes maintainership of this package I would like to discuss integrating some additions I made to the Translation module.

/Jonas

Hi Jonas,

Sorry about the delay. In my version of haskell-src-meta I basically replaced the entire Language.Haskell.TH.Instances.Lift module with derivations from the th-lift package whose latest version currently doesn't build [1]. I had been in contact with the maintainer of the package who has prepared a version 0.5 and was waiting for them to upload it so that I could use it as a dependency, but I haven't heard from them in a week or so. I'll try emailing them again, and as soon as 0.5 is on hackage I will go ahead with my upload.

I suppose since there's no reason why I deserve maintainership more than you you could just go ahead and upload your version instead. You can see exactly what I've done at my github repository [2].

Yours, Ben Millwood

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/th-lift-0.4 [2] http://github.com/benmachine/haskell-src-meta

I'm also waiting on a 6.12-compatible version of haskell-src-meta so I can release a version of my package for quasiquoting C/CUDA. I pulled Mark's changes to create a version that maintains compatibility with version 2.3 of the template-haskell library (and therefore with GHC 6.10). Is there any chance we can keep backwards-compatibility? ;) I'm happy to help with patches and/or maintainership, of course.

Geoff

I imagine maintaining compatibility across template-haskell versions might be tricky. Prior to template-haskell-2.4.0.0, I believe there was no TH support for kinds, and class contexts were simply Types rebranded (not supporting equality constraints). So some not-inconsiderable sections of code would need duplication, or we'd need to deal with CPP which always struck me as a fragile and inelegant solution. Of course, I welcome the patches to prove me wrong :) or well, if you just want to take maintainership yourself, the package is really as much yours as it is mine at this stage.

Ben

I have patches that main compatibility with 6.10, but now that haskell-src-meta depends of th-lift, which requires template-haskell>=2.4, I think it's a lost cause. Versioning for template-haskell makes things a real mess now---if I want a package using haskell-src-meta to work on both 6.10 and 6.12, I basically have to test the version of GHC being used and set package dependencies appropriately. Unless someone has a better way? Geoff