[Haskell-cafe] Fw: patch applied (ghc): Remove the OpenGL family of libraries fromextralibs

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Tue Jul 29 19:58:20 EDT 2008


On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 15:34 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> > I don't think that's right. The HP maintainers are not (and cannot be)
> > the maintainers of each individual package. That just does not scale.
> 
> Oh absolutely, but I was imagining that (at least part of) the purpose
> of the Platform is to generate automatic notifications to package
> owners, when a change in either ghc or the packaging infrastructure or
> the package's dependencies, leads to their own package breaking.  So the
> Platform effectively generates an auto-prompt when maintenance is
> required.

I hope that this is something that hackage will provide to all packages,
including those in the platform.

> Given that such a lot of package-breakage is not due to changes in the
> functionality of the library itself, but purely to changes in the
> packaging system surrounding it, this would in my eyes shift
> a certain amount of responsibility in the right direction.  :-)
> (Not the responsibility to fix, but the responsibility to notify.)
> 
> As a package author (rather than a user), I would see this as a primary
> benefit of having my packages added to the Platform.  And as a package
> user (rather than author), there is the corresponding antibenefit of
> removing a package like HOpenGL from the Platform: a diminished
> likelihood of the maintainer being already aware of packaging flaws.

I really want to build the platform on the hackage infrastructure and
have all packages benefit from additional checks. Then users and
maintainers can act on that extra information. It should also make it
easier for new packages to join the platform because it'll be easier to
demonstrate that the various quality hoops have been jumped through.

So yes, we might expect platform volunteers to send occasional patches
to keep existing packages working, but really a package being in the
platform requires a maintainer rather than guaranteeing maintenance.

Duncan



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