[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 18:35 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On 2008 Sep 10, at 17:51, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> >> 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.
> 
> Are we?  I think the package author has final say if a package needs  
> to be backed off, and any packages released between the rollback and  
> the next release with dependencies on the backed-off package will be  
> problematic, no matter how draconian hackage's version checking is.   
> (This is a different situation from datecode versions as in the trac  
> ticket.)

I'm not quite sure I follow. Certainly it's the author/maintainer who
decides the version number. It's up to them to pick it, but they know
the ordering of version numbers.

As I understand it, epochs were mainly introduced to cope with
un-cooperative upstream maintainers whereas here maintainers already
have to specify a version number in the Cabal/Hackage scheme and there's
no way for them to pretend or unilaterally declare that 3 < 2 or any
other such silliness.

To account for having experimental versions available at the same time
as stable versions we're planning to let maintainers add a
suggested/soft version constraint. Is that related to what you mean by
"backing off" and "rollback"?

Duncan