[Haskell-cafe] Handling absent maintainers

[Mark Wotton]

Hello all,

I've recently had problems with haskell-src-meta. While it's a great
package, it doesn't currently compile on GHC 6.12, and Matt Morrow
doesn't seem to be around to push the version that does to Hackage.
Our "one-world" approach with cabal seems to discourage forking as a
casual act, so when a package that others rely on goes AWOL, it's very
awkward to fix it.

I can think of a few ways to get around my current problems:

1. upload haskell-src-meta-placeholder, or haskell-src-meta-mwotton,
or something similar - this could be said to pollute the namespace,
but would solve my immediate problem. I'd have to similarly specialise
the chain of packages up to the one I actually want to use as well,
though.

2. run my own hackage server and tell my users to use that instead.

3. ... profit?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to say something like "cabal install
my-hacked-package --as original-package" - are there fundamental
reasons that wouldn't be possible, or a bad idea?

mark