On Thursday 19 June 2008, Gwern Branwen wrote:
I'd like to note that these were not 'random forks'. JPB, the collections maintainer, apparently he split them up last year, listing himself and Hey as maintainers of various packages. All I did was fix up the usual Cabal breakage and re-upload when he accepted my patches; otherwise they are as they were.
For what it's worth, I'm the one who suggested to Gwern that he update the cabal stuff for collections. Someone had remarked that there was no good way to make use of various collection types in the standard libraries, and I knew that the collections package on hackage took steps toward rectifying that. But, it didn't build on 6.8, due to what looked like a split-base issue. I knew Gwern had experience fixing up cabal-related stuff, so I told him he might want to try getting them fixed. Looking at my IRC logs, I see that some of the split packages mentioned already existed on hackage at the time. I noted that COrdering and Data.Tree.AVL were. I'm not sure about the rest. Now the original collections package (which was building fine on 6.6) seems to be gone from hackage, even though it had been on there for quite some time (over a year, at a guess). -- Dan