Roman Cheplyaka
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 .)
I have also tried to upstream GHC 7.8 fixes to this package to no avail. However, the maintainer did inform me that the darcs repository is here[1]. It would be great if someone (it could be me, Roman, or anyone else interested) would take over the regex-tdfa package itself. While the forking idea certainly eliminates a lot of effort for the fork-er, it would be nice if the original point in the namespace were inhabited by an actively maintained package. I feel like an explosion of forks gives a not-so-great impression of the Haskell community and makes it even harder for beginners to find the right packages to depend upon. Concerning the friction imposed by the package take-over process, I agree that it is rather onerous. In my opinion the protocol is a bit too thorough for its own good. Cheers, - Ben [1] http://code.haskell.org/regex-tdfa/