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

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> [2014-05-15 11:18:09+0200]
> 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.

It works when you are the end user.

If you maintain an open source project that depends on a package that happened
to break or otherwise have bugs, you can't tell your users to download and fix
all those broken packages. Users rightly expect they should be able just `cabal
install` the project (if it's well maintained).

So if the package is not fixed on package promptly, forking remains the only
option.

> > * request package maintainership, which will take several weeks
> 
> I really hope that this will take months, not weeks, see the other discussion

I find it funny how you argue against forking, yet propose to create an even
stronger incentive to fork.

> > * 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.
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