[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 05:56 -0800, John Meacham wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:56:31PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 04:06 -0800, John Meacham wrote:
> > > Well, my main concern is that I have projects that have several
> > > distribution formats, tarball, rpm, deb, and hopefully hackage
> > > (alongside the others as equals). I don't want the version numbers to
> > > get out of sync though, just because I have to reroll the hackage, or
> > > rpm, or whatever release, I don't want to have to artificially increase
> > > its version number such that it gets out of sync with the actual version
> > > number of the package. For instance, I have a yum repository that
> > > contains my various projects (DrIFT, jhc, etc..) and bumping the release
> > > version is what I need to do to get 'yum update' to grab new versions,
> > > but I don't want to have to rerelease hackage, tarball, or deb versions
> > > to keep my version numbers in sync just for fixing an rpm or
> > > distribution compatability issue. With rpm I don't have to do this since
> > > it has a release version, so I am looking for something similar on the
> > > hackage side of things. 
> > 
> > If it's purely a change in the .cabal file then the second mechanism
> > that I described should be ok.
> > 
> > Or release foo-x.y.z.1 only on hackage with the semantics being that
> > it's a minor build fix for the primary version number foo-x.y.z. The
> > only difference is that someone can install both variants
> > simultaneously.
> 
> 
> yeah, but then we have the odd case of things like frisby 0.9.0 and
> 0.9.0.1 both floating about, where the second is actually just the
> cabalized version of the first, and not an actual version. it gets even
> more complicated if I actually want to create a _real_ frisby 0.9.0.1
> for a bug fix in the code. A dedicated 'release' number would be ideal
> and would make things more in line with the other packaging formats.

What would it mean? Is frisby-0.9.0-r1 different from frisby-0.9.0? Can
I install both at once? Is it just a tag on one digit of the version
number or does it change the semantics? Can another package depend on
frisby >= 0.9.0-r3 ?

Duncan