[Haskell-cafe] possible bug in latest hackage Elf (Elf-0.27)

[Sven Panne]

2014-05-15 9:30 GMT+02:00 Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info>:
> If there's no response, then you have two choices:

Actually three: Fix things locally until the "official" package is fixed.

> * request package maintainership, which will take several weeks

I really hope that this will take months, not weeks, see the other discussion

> * fork the package (i.e. upload your patched version to hackage under a
>   different name)

This proposal worries me quite a bit, because if everybody follows
that advice, it will turn Hackage into a chaotic collection of
packages with various degrees of being fixed/maintained/etc. Imagine a
package 'foo', which needs a fix, and several pepole think it's a good
idea to fork and fix the issue at hand. Now we have 'foo', 'foo-XY',
'foo-my-cool-acronym', ... Of course people normally have no incentive
to really take over maintainership for 'foo', they just want a working
'foo' right now for their own project. Later the real maintainer
re-appears after vacation/sabbatical/whatever, fixes 'foo', and
continues to work on it, adding new features. Now somebody new comes
to Hackage to see if there is already a package for some use case, and
finds 'foo', 'foo-XY', 'foo-my-cool-acronym', ... Then it takes some
non-trivial detective work to find out which packages are actually
dead (again) and which is the real one. => Chaos IMHO.

In a nutshell: If you are really in a hurry, fix things locally.
Hackage is not the place to fork like hell.