I'd say: - If a package has UNMAINTAINED (perhaps also DEPRECATED?) somewhere in its title/description, don't do anything. - Otherwise if the package hasn't been updated for past 3 months, send a quarterly reminder (including the information under what conditions the reminder is sent). 2013/5/5 Doug Burke

On May 5, 2013 7:25 AM, "Petr Pudlák" wrote:

...

Hi,

on another thread there was a suggestion which perhaps went unnoticed by

most:

...

...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Niklas Hambüchen Date: 2013/5/4 ... I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package maintainer a quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?" for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better indications concerning this.

This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could be as simple as "If

you consider yourself to be the maintainer of package X please just hit reply and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd just would display some red text like "This package seems to be unmaintained since D.M.Y."

...

Best regards, Petr

For those packages that give a repository, a query could be done automatically to see when it was last updated. It's not the same thing as 'being maintained', but is less annoying for those people with many packages on hackage.

Doug

Just checking the repo wouldn't work. It may still have some activity but not be maintained and vice-versa. On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Doug Burke wrote:

On May 5, 2013 7:25 AM, "Petr Pudlák" wrote:

...

Hi,

on another thread there was a suggestion which perhaps went unnoticed by most:

...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Niklas Hambüchen Date: 2013/5/4 ... I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package maintainer a quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?" for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better indications concerning this.

This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could be as simple as "If you consider yourself to be the maintainer of package X please just hit reply and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd just would display some red text like "This package seems to be unmaintained since D.M.Y."

Best regards, Petr

For those packages that give a repository, a query could be done automatically to see when it was last updated. It's not the same thing as 'being maintained', but is less annoying for those people with many packages on hackage.

Doug

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-- Felipe.

But what if the package is already perfect? Jokes aside, I think that activity alone wouldn't be a good indicator. On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Conrad Parker wrote:

On 6 May 2013 09:42, Felipe Almeida Lessa wrote:

...

Just checking the repo wouldn't work. It may still have some activity but not be maintained and vice-versa.

ok, how about this: if the maintainer feels that their repo and maintenance activities are non-injective they can additionally provide an http-accessible URL for the maintenance activity. Hackage can then do an HTTP HEAD request on that URL and use the Last-Modified response header as an indication of the last time of maintenance activity. I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but actually this would allow you to point hackage to a blog as evidence of maintenance activity.

I like the idea of just pinging the code repo.

Conrad.

...

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Doug Burke wrote:

...

On May 5, 2013 7:25 AM, "Petr Pudlák" wrote:

...

Hi,

on another thread there was a suggestion which perhaps went unnoticed

...

...

most:

...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Niklas Hambüchen Date: 2013/5/4 ... I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package

...

...

...

quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?" for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better indications concerning this.

This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could be as simple as "If you consider yourself to be the maintainer of package X please just hit reply and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd just would display some red text like "This package seems to be unmaintained since D.M.Y."

Best regards, Petr

For those packages that give a repository, a query could be done automatically to see when it was last updated. It's not the same thing as 'being maintained', but is less annoying for those people with many

by maintainer a packages

...

on hackage.

Doug

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-- Felipe.

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On 06/05/13 17:46, Tillmann Rendel wrote:

So what about this: Hackage could try to automatically collect and display information about the development status of packages that allow potential users to *guess*

In my opinion, that's what we have now. Obtaining the info in the four points you mention from their respective sources usually takes less than a minute in sum - hackage saving me that minute would give me little added value. Having the metrics you mention is nice, but still they are just metrics and say little the only thing that's important: Is there a human who commits themselves to this package?

I like the idea of displaying additional info about the status of package development, but I don't like the idea of annoying hard-working package maintainers with emails about their perfect packages

I really think this is not too big of a deal, getting one email every 3 months and clicking a few checkboxes. Probably fits into one cabal update.

On 06/05/13 20:06, Tillmann Rendel wrote:

Is "a human clicked the check box" a good metric for "a human commits themselves to this package"?

If the check box has the text "Do you want this thing to be called 'maintained' on Hackage" next to it, yes.

Well, that's what the "once every 3 months" is good for. On Mon 06 May 2013 20:34:13 SGT, Tobias Dammers wrote:

The problem is that people tend to (truthfully) check such a box, then stop maintaining the package for whatever reasons, and never bother unchecking the box.

I do think it's a real problem even for seasoned haskellers. I don't have problems in remembering which packages I should use for the things I've already used before recently, but I need to search Hackage just as everyone else as soon as I need to do something new. I also agree that this is more of a social problem not a tooling one. Hackage would just provide a tool for helping this kind of social interaction. On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Carter Schonwald

wrote:

is that really a problem though?

Who's problem are we trying to solve? Is this being proposed to help seasoned haskellers, or make getting started easier for new folks?

those are two VERY different problems. Also many of the maintainers for heavily used packages are incredibly busy as is, do they need to keep track of even *more* email? I'd hope not.

In some respects, just having the hackage2 deps and revdeps stats is a good proxy for how likely a package is to be well maintained.

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, Niklas Hambüchen wrote:

...

Well, that's what the "once every 3 months" is good for.

On Mon 06 May 2013 20:34:13 SGT, Tobias Dammers wrote:

...

The problem is that people tend to (truthfully) check such a box, then stop maintaining the package for whatever reasons, and never bother unchecking the box.

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-- Felipe.

Being in favor of not needlessly harassing people, even for a few minutes, I would favor issuing such emails only when there is some reason to believe that the package is not maintained. The two situations I can see that would justify such an email: - A dependency exceeds the upper bound listed in the cabal file. - It fails to build on the most recent GHC with its listed dependencies. Every three months, issue one email per address listing packages that are in one of those conditions at the moment and have been for at least a week (or longer--I care little there). I think this strikes a good balance between bothering people needlessly and doing nothing (although it does not properly catch unmaintained packages that build but with serious bugs; I welcome any automatic ways to determine that with reasonably low false positive rates). --IRS

Don't underestimate how greatly people appreciate being saved a couple of minutes! On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Niklas Hambüchen wrote:

On 06/05/13 17:46, Tillmann Rendel wrote:

...

So what about this: Hackage could try to automatically collect and display information about the development status of packages that allow potential users to *guess*

In my opinion, that's what we have now.

Obtaining the info in the four points you mention from their respective sources usually takes less than a minute in sum - hackage saving me that minute would give me little added value.

Having the metrics you mention is nice, but still they are just metrics and say little the only thing that's important:

Is there a human who commits themselves to this package?

...

I like the idea of displaying additional info about the status of package development, but I don't like the idea of annoying hard-working package maintainers with emails about their perfect packages

I really think this is not too big of a deal, getting one email every 3 months and clicking a few checkboxes.

Probably fits into one cabal update.

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Deepseq comes to mind regarding a "perfect" package that doesn't require active maintenance. - Clark On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Petr Pudlák wrote:

2013/5/6 Tillmann Rendel

...

Petr Pudlák wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------

...

From: *Niklas Hambüchen* mailto:mail@nh2.me> Date: 2013/5/4 ... I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package maintainer a quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?" for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better indications concerning this.

This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could be as simple as "If you consider yourself to be the maintainer of package X please just hit reply and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd just would display some red text like "This package seems to be unmaintained since D.M.Y."

I like the idea of displaying additional info about the status of package development, but I don't like the idea of annoying hard-working package maintainers with emails about their perfect packages that actually didn't need any updates since ages ago.

I understand, but replying to an email with an empty body or clicking on a link once in a few months doesn't seem to be an issue for me. And if somebody is very busy and doesn't update the package, it's more fair to signal from the start that (s)he doesn't want to maintain the package.

Personally it happened to me perhaps several times that I used a promising package and discovered later that's it's not being maintained. I'd say that the amount of time required to confirm if authors maintain their packages is negligible compared to the amount of time people lose this way.

Just out of curiosity, do you have some examples of such packages, that are being maintained, but not updated since they're near perfect? I'd like to know if this is a real issue. It seems to me

...

So what about this: Hackage could try to automatically collect and display information about the development status of packages that allow potential users to *guess* whether the package is maintained or not. Currently, potential users have to collect this information themselves.

Here are some examples I have in mind:

* Fetch the timestamp of the latest commit from the HEAD repo * Fetch the number of open issues from the issue tracker * Display reverse dependencies on the main hackage page * Show the timestamp of the last Hackage upload of the uploader

Tillmann

Those are good ideas. Some suggestions:

I think we already have the timestamp of each upload, this already gives some information. Perhaps we could add a very simple feature saying how long ago that was and adding a warning color (like yellow if more than a year and red if more than two years).

Reverse dependencies would certainly help a lot, but it works only for libraries, not for programs. (Although it's less likely that someone would search hackage for programs.)

The problem with issue trackers is that (a) many packages don't have one, (b) there are many different issue trackers.

Best regards, Petr

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