Re: 'temporary' package

I like this email, and perhaps the ideas therein should be used as a guideline for how hackage/admin powers are used! its certainly very easy for a downstream maintainer to temporarily resolve their compat issues with a private in tree copy of their dependency (assume that the types of the upstream are never exposed in the down stream api of course!) On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Edward Kmett wrote:

I just want to say that I personally find this thread an the the similar "sky is falling" discussion about Lennart being on vacation for 2 weeks to be alarming and far far too hasty.

Please consider the implications of such a 'shoot first' policy on participation within the community.

Max has written a lot of packages that people depend on, but maintenance is not always done on the time table of the most eager user. I would hesitate to risk driving him out of the community / removing his agency from this matter simply because he doesn't respond fast enough for you.

I sent him some patches for ansi-wl-pprint, and while I nervously wondered this exact same thing about whether he was still active, he accepted them within a couple of weeks and shipped out a new version.

Bryan O'Sullivan took a month or two to merge patches from me for text in the past. Should I have forked text or taken it away from him?

Ross Paterson has accumulated two years of patches and libraries@requests and updates to transformers. I harassed him a couple of times over that interval and even offered to take over maintainership, but it is his package, his timeline and his call. Given the scope of the package and the number of factors involved it was well within his rights to deliberate as long as he did, and it was his call to minimize breakage by batching a bunch of seemingly minor changes into one big release. I'd even argue in retrospect that it was the right call. He's also probably rightly annoyed at me for being so damn pushy. ;)

Lennart ultimately responded positively to the request to just bump and ship, but he'd also have been within his rights not to have.

I'm currently slowly working through the ramifications of the new transformers/mtl release for all of my packages. They are deceptively complicated.

If I naively slam the version bounds up then I will break many big packages that depend on my packages that are at or near the backtracking limit of cabal. It already has caused some problems and I'm in search of the right fix.

I live, eat, and breath Haskell, but if someone were to pull this stunt on me while I'm in the process of deliberating, just because I happen to be off in Australia at a conference and have reduced attention to note and rebut such a thread (which I am!) I would get quite angry and it would be a reasonable response.

I've had 2 week stretches when I'm working in an environment where I can't adequately test a patch that "should just work" and I've had some I took one that purported to work on trust that broke everything.

Not everyone produces micro-updates for every package they maintain daily, nor should they be forced to by some overeager package maintenance policy that actively discourages participation.

When you interact with another package maintainer please consider that your patch may not be the only thing going on in their life.

-Edward Kmett

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 2:37 AM, Carter Schonwald < carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

...

spoke with edward, we're gonna wait and give Max (who's pretty darn busy) the breathing room to do the fixes needed.

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Carter Schonwald < carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Alex, honestly the thread isn't about maintainership, but rather pushing a fix to temporary.

Likewise, Maxes other public libs, like test-framework, haven't been maintained in nearly a year.

What's going to happen is sometime today/ tomorrow I'm going to push a minor version bump to temporary to stop the breakages.

Then if max doesn't reply in the next month, figuring out new maintainership.

Nothing precludes reverting the maintainership to max should he then surface. But if someone's been Mia for months already, not so likely :-)

On Saturday, May 10, 2014, Alexander Berntsen wrote:

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I just wanted to say that this whole thread is close to scaring me off *ever* putting a library on Hackage. I have worked in free software for quite some time, and let me assure you that it's not common practice elsewhere to hijack software if the maintainer does not respond for four days.

Forking is OK, that's a freedom afforded to us by free software. But if Hackage ever adopts a policy in which it's OK for someone to hijack libraries if the maintainer is unable to respond in four days, I'm definitely keeping my software away from Hackage.

I agree completely with Jake. This is all a big nonsense to me.

As a sidenote: Just recently a maintainer of a program I'm a developer of did not respond in a couple of days. Turns out his mother had died. Imagine if he came back and had to go through a bunch of red tape to get back maintainership, because someone couldn't wait four days. How absolutely demotivating and frustrating. Then he checks his email to find a thread on the software's mailing list, with "there's no good reason why a package should remain broken for more than a day". - -- Alexander alexander@plaimi.net https://secure.plaimi.net/~alexander -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/

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