Fork `basement`? As `baseplate`?

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This is a similar story to the memory package (see:

basement is a direct dependency of memory).

That is, I understand that there is a need to fork the basement package. It arises because:

  • the originator, and (primary) Hackage maintainer, of basement is Vincent Hanquez;
  • for reasons that Vincent has set out elsewhere (including here, about a year ago), he does not wish to develop basement further or introduce other maintainers;
  • Nicholas Di Prima, another maintainer, has declined further involvement (see here); and
  • Michael Snoyman, the last of the three recorded maintainers, has told me that he does not want to violate Vincent’s wishes. Michael has tried to contact Vincent on my behalf but has not received a reply to date.

As with memory, I think: ‘Surely there is someone better placed than me to look after basement’s future?’ So, I raise this topic. However, I am willing to look after basement.

If I published a fork, I am thinking that baseplate would be a good name (as Hackage would not accept Basement). It has the same sense of ‘something that something else is built upon’.

If I implemented this idea, I would be:
(a) an ‘avoid bitrot’-type of maintainer;
(b) definitely in the market for more skilled co-maintainers; and
(c) at least, a person who could be contacted and could ‘reach out to the community’ if something arose that needed action beyond my own capabilities.

My motivation is partly that Stack 3.7.1 depends on basement, as follows:

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and basement bitrot is finding its way to issues raised at Stack’s GtiHub repository.

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In my Stack diagram, all of the following are also ‘Vincent Hanquez’ (sole maintainer) packages:

  • socks : Socks proxy (version 5) implementation
  • pem : Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) format reader and writer
  • asn1-parse : Simple monadic parser for ASN1 stream types
  • asn1-encoding : ASN1 data reader and writer in raw form
  • asn1-types : ASN.1 standard types

So, forks would be needed of all of them, to free Stack from its dependency on basement. To explore possibilities, I have raised:

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I think longterm one should trace out how much of basement and memory are actually used by most dependents – my sense its its really only a small portion of both, which could be fruitfully extracted and maintained as a much slimmer package.

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