Maintainer involvement

[svobot]

Hi @tfausak,

I see the issues #309 and #322, but wanted to ask more about your maintainership plans. @scrive, where I work, uses brittany internally and is in the process of evaluating the choice. We are interested in:

• Are you planning on maintaining brittany to keep it usable with new GHC releases into the foreseeable future?
• Do you need help for the maintenance? (With Support GHC 9.0 #356, Support only GHC 9.0 #357?)
• Are you invested in it privately at @EdutainmentLIVE or are you aware of any other industry users?
• Is any major work on brittany needed to play well with RecordDotSyntax when that extension comes?

Thank you for your time!

[tfausak]

Are you planning on maintaining brittany to keep it usable with new GHC releases into the foreseeable future?

Assuming that I can get #357 to work, I plan to continue doing the maintenance work to keep Brittany working with new GHC releases. This assumes that new versions of GHC don't dramatically change the API. If that happens, I may give up because dealing with the churn is annoying. For example GHC 9.0 restructured the entire module hierarchy.

Do you need help for the maintenance?

I certainly wouldn't turn down any help!

Are you invested in it privately at @EdutainmentLIVE or are you aware of any other industry users?

I do use it for work. I am aware of other industry users, but nobody that I can name.

Is any major work on brittany needed to play well with RecordDotSyntax when that extension comes?

Oh yes, definitely. See #332. In general Brittany needs to be updated to support language extensions. It doesn't happen automatically. And typically language extensions introduce new configuration points for Brittany as well. Consider UnicodeSyntax: Brittany needs to handle it, and also people probably want a way to force it on or off.

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In short, I can probably continue to keep Brittany building, but it's on a best effort basis from me. GHC is complicated and there are lots of changes, both internally (module hierarchy, trees that grow, etc.) and externally (new language extensions, bugs, new feature requests).

[vaclavsvejcar]

@tfausak Speaking about future maintenance of Brittany, do you know if @lspitzner is still anyhow interested in future development, or do you have any means of contacting him? I tried to reach him some time ago via e-mail, but without any response.

Also I'd be happy to help with any development/maintenance, but at this moment, Brittany codebase is complete blackbox to me, probably mostly due to fact that I don't understand how ghc-exactprint (and GHC internals) work and can't find any reasonable resources for learning.

[eborden]

I was just thinking about RecordDotSyntax and how brittany will need to be updated. I have been a terrible contributor through the pandemic, but this new language extension may resurrect me from the grave.

[tfausak]

I’m going to close this for now. I just released version 0.14.0.0. I aim to maintain Brittany moving forward, but I can’t necessarily commit to any fixed amount of time or cadence. Please open issues for any specific bugs or feature requests. Thanks!