Generally we (the Hackage admins) ask you to do the following before asking us to take over a package.

Maintainer unreachable:

1. Try to contact the maintainer. Give him/her reasonable time to respond.
2. State your intention to take over the package in a public forum (e.g. haskell-cafe/libraries list). CC maintainer.
3. Wait a while.
4. Send us an email, with a link to the public email thread.
5. We will grant you maintenance rights.

Maintainer reachable:

Option 1 (preferred):

1. Original maintainer gives you access at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/<package>/maintainers/

Option 2:

1. Email us, with the maintainer CCed.
2. Maintainer replies to email saying it's OK.
3. We grant access.

-- Johan


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 8:30 AM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma@ro-che.info> 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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