[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 11:49 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> 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*.

We've thought about this and we think we do not need epoch numbers since
we're in the lucky position of doing the upstream versioning.

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/135

Hmm, I think the discussion on that ticket must have been in an email
thread in cabal-devel.

Duncan