That does explain a lot. Especially the part about stack:
Special call out: Stack
Stack is by far the largest project I maintain. I don’t maintain it alone, but none of the maintainers are spending a significant amount of time on it. Frankly, for all of my needs, it’s checking the boxes right now. Most of my pain points come from changes coming upstream from GHC or Cabal causing breakage, or introducing new features (like multiple libraries per package) that require large overhauls to how Stack operates.
I haven’t said this before, but I’ll say it now: I’m not interested in investing any time in staying on that treadmill, or introducing new features to Stack. I had hoped that with the Haskell Foundation launch this year, we would have an affiliation process for projects that allowed better interproject communication and reduced the maintenance burden. That never came into existence, and so now I feel pretty comfortable in saying: outside of making sure Stack continues to work for my primary use cases, I’m not going to be investing my own time much going forward.
People are free to take those statements as they will. I’m not sure how large an overlap there is between Stack users and people looking to use the latest GHC and Cabal features that it doesn’t support. I know that it becomes a blocker for the Stackage team sometimes. And I know regressions in Stack with newer GHC/Cabal versions (like overly aggressive recompilation, or broken deregister support for private libraries) causes the Stackage team pain and suffering. I’d love to see these addressed. But I’m not going to do it myself.
In other words, this is a more serious call to action than I’ve made previously. If people want to see changes and improvements to Stack, you need to get involved personally. I’ll continue maintaining the project in its current state, together with other maintainers currently doing so. But in the past few months, as I’ve been thinking about where I wanted to spend my limited time after the babies were born, I decided that it was time to call out Stack as needing motivated maintainers, or to see it sit in a feature complete, non-evolving state. I’m quite happy with either outcome.
I’m not happy with the current situation which is that Stack is “feature complete” and blocking innovation (Backpack) and is not integrating well with other tools (HLS & GHCup).