[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Sep 10, at 6:48, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 10. September 2008 11:47 schrieben Sie:
>> So we should think about how to make it less confusing. Perhaps like
>> distributors use an extra revision number we should do the same.
>
> Yes, maybe this is the way to go.


Everyone who manages packages runs into this, and all of them use  
revision numbers like this.  (.rN for gentoo was already mentioned;  
BSD ports and MacPorts use _, RPM uses -.  Depot collections at CMU  
also use -.)

And while we're on that topic, most of them also have an "epoch" which  
overrides the version number.  If for some reason an updated package  
*doesn't* change the version, or goes backwards (because of a major  
bug leading to backing off the new release), you increase the epoch so  
dependent packages don't get confused when it's re-released.  If we're  
considering modifying hackage's versioning, we should probably decide  
if we want/need this now instead of having to add it in later when  
something major goes *boom*.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH