[Haskell-cafe] Hackage feature request: E-mail author when a package breaks

[Paul R]

> On 1 November 2011 21:35, Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
>> or even
>> 
>>  Maintainer: Ketil Malde <ketil at malde dot org>  -- email me if you
>> are human

> Though unless the hackage email bot is smart enough, this will result
> in a lot of unsendable emails...

But the bot is not a human, so that's what ketil wanted after all.

That said, I agree with Ketil that a maintainer should care about its
package being broken, and the least would be to accept to be noticed.

If the build process fails because of some reasons other than broken
package (missing deps, wrong platform ...), then fix the build process.
It should not be too hard to skip packages with unmet dependencies, or
to get them installed on hackage servers, or even for the maintainer to
bundle them within the package, like for example this package :

  http://hackage.haskell.org/package/yaml-0.4.1.1


Regarding unsolicited mail, when a maintainer fill its email adress in
the project.cabal, and send it to hackage, his adress will appear in
clear text on the hackage page and rapidly be scrapped, invariably
leading to tons of spam (in the proper sens of SPAM). So I guess these
maintainers have some way to filter their mail inbox anyway, and should
be able, if they really want, to filter hackage build-failure email :)



-- 
  Paul