Hi there! so this comes up periodically, and I think we need to discuss this. This is not related to anything right now, so if you wonder if I'm writing this because of something that just happened that I'm involved and you might have missed something, you probably did not. It came up on the #ghc IRC channel a few day ago.
GHC depends on quite a set of libraries, and ships those in releases. When ever a new GHC release is cut, all these dependencies need to be on hackage and have release versions. We do not want to produce a GHC release which depends on in-flight packages. In-flight might happen for example due to GHC having to patch dependencies to make them work with HEAD. Everyone who maintains any kind of software online, knows that maintenance can be a drag, and then life happens, and what not. There are many very responsive maintainers and we all owe them a grate amount of gratitude towards their relentless work, keeping those libraries up to date and responding to questions, patches, ... I therefore would like to float the following idea to make the GHC release processes a bit more reliable. GHCHQ (that is those in charge of producing GHC releases for us all), are made co-maintainers on each library GHC depends on, to guarantee that GHC can move forward in the worst of circumstances. Now I would hope that in almost all cases GHCHQ would never have to maintain any of the dependencies actively, they deal with GHC already, so let's try to keep it that way. However GHCHQ can, after a 14day notification period, exercise the co-maintainance and cut releases (and upload them to hackage), should the maintainer not be able to do so on his own for various reasons. I'd like to see this as an insurance policy for GHC continuous development. The only alternative that I see would be that GHCHQ starts forking dependencies and initiates the hackage maintainer takeover protocol, which will cause additional delays, and incurs an extra burden on the GHC maintainers. I hope we can all agree that libraries that end up being dependencies of GHC should be held in high regards and form the very foundation GHC is built upon. As such it should be an honour to have GHCHQ being a co-maintainer for ones library, as it signifies that importances of the library for the continuous development of GHC. Again I don't expect much to change, except for GHCHQ becoming co-maintainers for libraries GHC depends on. The baseline expectation will remain as it is. However we will have ensured the frictionless development of GHC going forward. Cheers, Moritz _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
