Who maintains process?

[tomjaguarpaw]

I'm a bit confused about who maintains process, in particular, who amongst the maintainers sees themselves as having the authority to take significant decisions over the package, and who sees themselves as having the skill and knowledge necessary to make technical decisions about the implementation. I am technically a maintainers, but I don't see myself as having either of those properties.

For the record, the people listed as package maintainers on Hackage are (reordered in my rough descending estimate of activity in the public Haskell ecosystem):

• BenGamari
• tomjaguarpaw (me)
• MichaelSnoyman
• SimonMarlow
• AustinSeipp
• HerbertValerioRiedel
• IanLynagh

The last three of these people are not floating around anywhere in the public Haskell ecosystem currently, as far as I know. Every PR on the first page of the PRs list (that is, in the last 18 months) was merged by me or @bgamari.

I have some maintainer rights over this repo, but not enough rights to see what rights other people have.

I see myself as a sort of "stop gap" or "emergency" maintainer who is available to take administrative actions when necessary. I have a passing familiarity with Linux process internals, but beyond that I am not really qualified to maintain this package.

I am concerned that important issues may go unaddressed, if we do not have the people available to effectively maintain this package.

---

As a first step, maybe we can ask this: @igfoo @thoughtpolice @hvr: would you like to keep your maintainer rights over process? That is, Hackage upload rights and GitHub maintainers rights (that you may or may not have -- I can't see either way.) It may seem perverse to attempt to remove maintainers when I'm suggesting we have too few, but hopefully doing so will highlight the importance of finding new active maintainers.

[bgamari]

For what it's worth, I do consider myself a maintainer in the sense that I can and will try to fix bugs and make releases when necessary. However, I do not anticipate doing considerable work beyond this.

[tomjaguarpaw]

Thanks @bgamari, that's probably a step more than I am capable of, except in very particular cases, so grateful to have your support.

[Bodigrim]

Few years ago Michael asked me (as a chair of CLC) if I can suggest a new maintainer to replace him. I suggested @tomjaguarpaw and Michael granted him rights. So in terms of authority Tom has bulletproof rights, including installing new maintainers.

GitHub maintainers are exactly three: Michael, Tom and Ben. The rest of the people with Hackage upload rights are there most likely for historical reasons: long-long time ago process was a part of base and maintainers of base kinda inherited rights to the original core packages when base was split.

All in all, I'm pretty sure that Tom and Ben have all authority to maintain process as they see fit. Or, since process is a core package, reach out to CLC for help.

[tomjaguarpaw]

Thanks @Bodigrim, I will proceed on that basis

[tomjaguarpaw]

Regarding Hackage uploader rights, it's important from a security standpoint to minimize blast radius and keep the list as small as possible, so as a first step I intend to remove upload rights of @igfoo @thoughtpolice @hvr in due course, though if they want to return to active maintainership I would welcome it.