Last month, Brendan Hay and I released the 2.0 version of Amazonka, the de facto but unofficial AWS SDK for Haskell. Before that, Amazonka had seen intermittent commits and some pretty major improvements, but hadn’t managed an actual release in about four years. Because of the lack of visible progress, more serious industrial users maintained private forks instead of contributing to the main repository. It took about two years of work to pick up what was left behind, triage all the open issues, make several necessary major improvements, and get the whole project back into a shippable state.
I believe that many open source ecosystems have projects like Amazonka: projects which are large, important to their ecosystem, and stuck. These are my notes about how to unstick such a project, using Amazonka as a case study. It’s a fair amount of work, but a surprising amount of help can come out of the woodwork once someone makes the first move. That person could be you, and if it’s not you, then who’s it gonna be?
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