[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Austin Seipp]

> The usual solution to this is the 'release version', which is used in
> most (all?) other packaging systems. namely, you have foo-1.2-4, where 4 is the
> release version which documents what version the meta-info is. For
> instance, when bugs are fixed in the rpm spec file or deb package that
> number is bumped and it is independent of the underlying packaged
> softwares release. It would be very useful if hackage could support
> something like this.
> 
>         John
>  

Hi John,

Hackage currently does not support this policy because of
e.g. dependency tracking - previously hackage *was* allowed to upload
packages of the form 'foo-1.2.3-unstable' but the problem was that it
includes the -unstable as part of the version number. In the general
case - arbitrary identifier suffixes as part of the version - when
someone just specifies a dependency on 'foo', does foo-1.0-bar >
foo-1.0-baz or not?

Duncan 'fixed' hackage and put the restriction on the upload form - at
the time I discussed this with him due to a problem with hsgnutls
because it had the -barracuda suffix on the package version.

In the case of meta-info specifying doc versions, I think we could
allow package names of the form 'x.y.z_n' where x y z and n can only
be integers. Then statements of the form e.g. 'foo-2.0_4 > foo-2.0_3'
make sense and cabal and cabal install can understand this - of
course, ghc-pkg won't accept such a version identifier, so it will
only have meaning to cabal but in the case of documentation fixes and
the like that's not much of a big deal really.

Austin