[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Sep 10, at 18:43, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> 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

That is one use.  The far more common use, at least in FreeBSD ports,  
is when a version of a port has to be backed off; if any subsequently  
released packages depend on the backed-off version, things get nasty  
when the port is re-updated later.  This may not involve the port  
author; it could be an unexpected interaction with an updated  
dependency under certain circumstances.

"Backed off", in the FreebSD context, means an older version of the  
port is restored from CVS; in the context of Hackage it means removing  
the broken version and making the previous version the current version.

Basically, you *do* have control over this... but it's possible for  
the effects to propagate rather widely before such an interaction is  
discovered, resulting in needing to revise either many packages to  
reflect the corrected dependency... or updating one epoch.

-- 
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