[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 18:53 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

> > 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.

Ok, so we never remove packages. So that's ok. You could fix the above
problem in two ways, adjust the suggested version constraint (which is
of course still vapourware) or upload a new version.

(Well, we sometimes remove packages that were uploaded without the
consent of the author. But that does not apply here.)

Duncan