[Haskell-cafe] Experiences with cabal-install and Hackage

[Malcolm Wallace]

> My only problem with
> Hackage is I feel like the maintainer is a fence I have to climb every
> time I want to upload a bugfix or a non-broken version of the package.
> I just want to fix it, upload it, and continue with my work.

Unfortunately, experience shows that a gatekeeper is usually  
necessary.  Otherwise random people create and apply patches that  
break stuff they don't care about, whilst fixing only their immediate  
problem.  Distributed version control, like darcs and git, already  
lowers the barrier to participation very significantly.  But having  
someone review patches before publishing them to the world at large is  
widely considered the most effective quality control known in the  
field of software engineering.

Regards,
     Malcolm