Re: 'temporary' package

Frankly, even 2-3 week turnaround can often be too tight. I would caution us to err very highly on the side of caution. Many package maintainers do not upgrade to the latest and greatest GHC. Some will stick to platform releases. I want more and more of the Haskell ecosystem to work with GHC 7.8, but I don't expect it all to until after there is a platform release that contains it. I have some developers who shove me patches to support GHC 7.9, some that I take as I can, but some I would have to take them blindly and will not be correct for 7.9 as it exists in a few months, but only as it exists now. Should we hold those to the same timetable? Even by these extended "2-3 week" terms both Ross and Bryan would be dealing with forks / reclaiming their packages and both are fairly active members of our community, wonderful contributors whose gears merely mesh with everyone else's intermittently. The pain of a false positive far exceeds the cost of waiting longer. If we're going to enshrine this in policy, I'd really only feel comfortable with something like a hard 6 month no-response rule, after multiple contact attempts, and that the issue should be something that is clearly affecting a released platform. That is long enough that it is obvious that the maintainer is disconnected, and where the moral balance has *clearly* shifted to the community good. If someone wants to go through the pain of maintaining some kind of registry for maintainers to opt-in to a tighter timeline then by all means do so, but I far prefer an inclusive approach that allows maintainers to go do other things for a while. If you feel the need is pressing, you *can* fork, but forks that smash the same namespace do drive fragmentation in the community, so I'd plead with folks to do so with caution. -Edward Kmett On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Erik Hesselink wrote:

...

I understand that Max did a bunch of very important work, then became occupied with other things in the world. And in the long term, that needs to be sorted out. But in the short term, a four-day-notice policy is silly. And furthermore, even though there's nothing _wrong_ with forking

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 8:11 PM, Gershom Bazerman wrote: promiscuously,

...

it tends to create a mess, to no good end.

Just a small note since this was mentioned a couple of times: as hackage admins we don't have a 'four-day-notice policy'. The package takeover procedure [0] just says 'a while', and we've taken this to mean at least 2-3 weeks to account for vacations, other absences, general busyness etc.

Erik

[0] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Taking_over_a_package _______________________________________________ Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries