Simon Peyton Jones via Libraries
| - the kicker: Any library that wishes to be included in GHC / base *must | share maintainership* with the GHC release team / libraries committee, | respectively/./ That means those groups can release things whenever they | want to unblock themselves.
That seems very plausible to me. But "sharing maintainership" could be limited to:
The GHC release team is free to make a minor (patch-level) release of an existing released version of the library L, embodying any changes necessary to make the library work with the new version of GHC
I think that is all that's needed. In general GHC should not rely on a bleeding-edge release of a library. But it's not uncommon for tiny changes to be needed, and by sharing maintainership, the library author would not need to be bothered about making and releasing those changes.
Yes, this is precisely what I was trying to articulate in my original email (although failed to do so clearly). We would not want to be responsible for managing major releases; merely incremental patch-level releases to patch things up to be shippable with GHC. Cheers, - Ben