[Haskell-cafe] Hackage and HaXml situation

[John Goerzen]

Marc Weber wrote:
> In your particular problem there is another way:
> Ask the distributors to ship both HaXmL versions..
> (Most systems will install one only by default (an update supersedes the
> older one :-( ) But most distributions do let you install two or more
> versions (?)

Yes, most distributions package only one at a time, and yes most could
package more than one.  Perhaps that would even work with HaXml.

BUT:

1) There is still significant end-user confusion

2) This approach doesn't scale once we start thinking of more packages

> I think the way to go is beeing able to represent all the work you've
> done.
> I'd like to add a pointer to vxml on hackage. But it's still way to
> unstable for a release.

See, I don't think that Hackage should discourage posting unstable code
-- just discourage posting code that is less stable than the previous
release.

I think there is very little code too unstable for release!  Release
early, release often.  I wrote my first ever Xlib client in C the other
day.  It's up at git://git.complete.org/ledmon.  My first ever patches
to xmobar are up at http://darcs.complete.org/xmobar.  Don't let
unstable scare you off from releasing.

> How would branches look like?
> We no longer have
> 
> 0.1
> 0.2
> 0.5
> ...
> 
> But each version has a set of children and a set of parents (merges) ?

Simplest way to do this would be to define a boolean flag: "stable" or
"unstable".  Similarities to Debian here.

More complex, you could let authors define branches.  The default branch
is presented, well, by default.  Others are visible.  Similarities to
Freshmeat here.

I don't know that this has to be terribly complex.  Just something to
get us out of the current situation and prevent it from happening again.

-- John