Maintainers needed

[Faré]

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 12:51 AM, Burton Samograd
<burton.samograd at gmail.com> wrote:
> What do you think are the most high priority projects that require maintaining?
>
Highest priority are probably those projects that currently break on
Quicklisp yet are dependencies of other projects:
madeira-port, mgl-pax.

In github.com/fare-patches, there are 16 CL repositories I cloned for
which I sent build PRs, often months ago. (Also four unrelated forks
of healthy non-CL repos; ignore them.) I also have a patch for s-dot
which is not on github. These are all candidates for sharplisping if
the maintainers are confirmed not available anymore and anyone cares
(beware: in some cases, the maintainer is still there, e.g. fukamachi,
just not responsive to those PRs).

If you're serious about in-depth curation of the ecosystem, then you'd
have to see which maintainers have quit (see a partial list in
previous email), and migrate their libraries en masse to sharplispers,
though you'll find that *some* of these libraries already have new
maintainers who may or may not be motivated to seriously maintain
them, so you'll have to see with them what is best. Some
ex-maintainers may be willing to add a redirection from their
repository to yours (at least if it's on github), or to give you the
keys to their repositories (particularly so if on
gitlab.common-lisp.net).

Some libraries are not broken but are piling PRs, e.g. cl-json, bknr.
Some libraries have serious bugs and/or are not portable enough in
some features, e.g. bordeaux-threads. Some libraries are broken and
better left to rot. Some libraries might be better merged, or
transformed into thin compatibility layers on top of a common library
(like so many test libraries, or things that could be superseded by
uiop — see also my post on consolidation
https://fare.livejournal.com/169346.html ). Some libraries just need
better documentation, tests and examples.

I personally believe that many the libraries I'm leaving behind are
useful and deserve a new maintainer (see on github.com/fare). Of them
only ASDF is really popular. At least none of them is currently
broken. Some of them have a lot of potential, obviously unfulfilled
(e.g. lisp-interface-library), and many are possibly underrated
because underdocumented (cl-launch, command-line-arguments,
inferior-shell, uiop, cl-scripting).

As for me, I'm jumping ship to Gerbil Scheme (cons.io) — but I just
want to leave the place tidy and in good hands as I leave CL behind.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman
she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again."
   — TV listing for the Wizard of Oz in the Marin Independent Journal