new Darcs-Repository field?

[Isaac Jones]

Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> writes:

> Björn Bringert suggested that the Hackage page for a package should
> include a link to the Darcs repo (if any, but who uses anything else?)
> and maybe some darcs integration such as changelogs and the like.
> To make this work, we'd need a URL-valued Darcs-Repository field in the
> package description.

I'm all for it.  I'd love tighter integration with darcs.  FYI, I
think that's what some people use the package-url for.

We could also do a "pull" for such packages and host a version of the
repo on hackage.  If there's no darcs-repository, we could just create
one so we'd have a local version.

It would be great if Hackage could some day become the "public" repo
for many darcs projects, without having to give folks login accounts.

I picture a place where people can send patches
(packagename at hackage.haskell.org), and the owner(s) of the repo would
have a UI for browsing and accepting / applying patches.  Signed
packages by approved folks would get applied automatically.

Cabal-install could have a --get-repo option, so when the user fetches
the source, they get a darcs repository.

In Debian, the maintainers are distinct from the upstream developers,
and the same might be true in Hackage.  Debian uses tarred patches to
maintain the differences between the trees, but we could use darcs.

If a package sits unmaintained for a while... maybe the upstream
author has stopped applying patches, then people could volunteer to
take over the package or fork it.

To some extent these are juts darcs user interface ideas, but I think
that the combination of a version control system and a package manager
has a lot of possibilities.

So many possibilities :)

peace,

  isaac