Maintainers needed

Faré fahree at gmail.com
Sun Dec 17 07:51:52 UTC 2017


>> Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL
>> projects, as I myself may do soon:

> Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) persons
> on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As
> you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but
> continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work
> given the stability of most of their important projects that the community
> relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are
> already taken care of by sharplispers.
>
At least Edi Weitz, Hans Huebner, Nathan Froyd have made it official
(and soon me).
Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola — maybe it's just me they've been
ignoring me for months on github, by mail and on twitter; maybe they
still think they'll get back to Lisp some day; in the meantime their
software has bitrotted on Quicklisp.
David Lichteblau, Cyrus Harmon, Henrik Hjelte, Andreas Fuchs, Kevin
Rosenberg, Samium Gromoff — I believe at least some of them have made
it official.
There are many more authors who have quit whose name doesn't come to
me at this point, but that you'll identify as you skim the list of
packages of Quicklisp.
And there are just orphan packages, untouched in years.

And sometimes abandoned packages still work great, or are unused
anyway, so that's fine. Software lives, software dies. Sometimes
peacefully, sometimes in a fire.

However, consider that if you migrate to Sharplispers too eagerly, you
may waste time; but if you wait for the bitrot to set in before you
fork any given library, you won't see the PRs piling before the
project is in such disarray that three people reimplement from scratch
libraries that each do the 20% they need, further balkanizing the
community.

I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordination
on library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of the
reason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going to
happen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be done
on top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for some
kinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each his
own.

> It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the
> scale of the issue.
>
Not my job anymore. I would just rather pass the baton as I leave than
drop it on the floor. But I'll drop it if no one takes it.

I used to chase after authors whose systems I broke as I evolved ASDF
and it didn't support their abuse of ASDF internals or use of
deprecated ASDF functionality, and so I noticed a lot of things (and
remained blind to others of course). If anyone after me decides to
keep improving ASDF (rather than merely keep it running as is), he'll
notice as much.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Suggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is like
suggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer.  — Ricky Gervais



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