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

[Magnus Therning]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:02, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com> wrote:
>> 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.

An alternative would be to let people upload forks of a package,
similar to how github/bitbucket supports forks on a VCS level.

I'm not convinced it's a common enough situation to be worth the hassle though.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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