I want to ask a honest question: Who is GHC HQ? There is a page listing
who is on
- Haskell.org committee,
- on core libraries committee (CLC),
- GHC steering committee;
- there is a list of named maintainers for core libraries,
- and it is relatively easily to deduce who maintains other tools and
libraries relevant to GHC (e.g. Cabal or say `shake` for hadrian).
But who are in GHC HQ? Neither google nor gitlab.haskell.org search give
any hints.
---
I think the core issue here is bad or insufficient communication.
GHC-8.12 beta release is planned to happen in three months. There are
patches still in flight (e.g. for process, Cabal has tracking issue
open). I'm sure that maintainers are able to ack on that. Maybe start by
requiring these explicit acknowledgments?
I also want to remind about first GHC-8.10 schedule posted on this list
October 18 2019: start of one week freeze in preparation for
branching
October 25 2019: ghc-8.10 branch cut
November 8 2019: 8.10.1-alpha1
November 22 2019: 8.10.1-alpha2
December 6 2019: 8.10.1-alpha3
December 20 2019: 8.10.1-rc1
January 10 2020: Final 8.10.1 release
I haven't seen *any* updates to that. GHC-8.10.1 was released in end of
March 2020, *three months later*, text issue was urgent in beginning of
February.
The plan for GHC-8.12 is to
* Mid-June 2020: Aim to have all major features in the tree
* Late-June 2020: Cut the ghc-8.12 branch
* June - August 2020: 3 alpha releases
* 1 September 2020: beta release
* 25 September 2020: Final 8.12.1 release
are we still on track?
What I'm trying to say, it is that it is hard to believe that issue is
urgent for GHC. It's not the first time (relating to ghc-8.10) when
schedules are not been kept.
And this is one of reasons why I opened an issue about "Annual release
cycle, its structure and long-term-support".
- Oleg
On 1.6.2020 12.23, Moritz Angermann wrote:
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
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