[Haskell-cafe] Handling absent maintainers

[Alexander Solla]

On Jul 15, 2010, at 6:49 PM, Jason Dagit wrote:

>  Everyone has their own branch of everything they contribute to,  
> listed right on the website?  This is inline with another idea I've  
> heard where we'd have a 'stable' hackage and 'unstable/dev'  
> versions.  But, how does this work for resolving and communicating  
> dependencies?

One thing cabal is missing is a... cabal to pick and choose APIs.   
Imagine:

1. Hackage-stable
2. Multiple Hackage-dev's, each based on current Hackage-stable (if  
they're too old, they're out of the running for inclusion in stable)

Hackage-dev packages are submitted to the Hackage-stable Cabal, which  
picks and chooses the nicest code.  Hackage-stable incorporates that  
code.  The Cabal would be responsible for coordinating dependencies.   
(This would potentially involve some programming from members of the  
Cabal)

This is kind of in line with how Haskell Platform is being built up.   
They take popular/useful packages with mature API's and promote them  
to the platform if there's enough interest.