[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[Ross Paterson]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 10:07:54AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 10:26 +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
> > So if Debian or Gentoo etc repackage one of these packages in their
> > distributions, what is the pristine tarball that they use?
> 
> They use the one and only pristine tarball. As for what meta-data they
> choose, that's up to them, they have the choice of using the
> original .cabal file in the .tar.gz or taking advantage of the updated
> version.

Since the modified version may contain essential fixes, they'll almost
certainly want that.  And they'll want to keep their mods separate, so
the updated .cabal file becomes another part of the upstream source, with
secondary versioning.  To which they add a third level of versioning for
their distro packaging.  And all this versioning is real; it's keeping
track of significant changes at each stage.

And then there's the psychological effect.  Make it easier to clean up
broken releases afterwards, and you'll have more of them.