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

[Markus Läll]

I would argue *for* forking. Hackage is big and consists of many packages
which have only a few users, or maybe just one -- the author. I don't see
all these packages if I don't go on the page and look. But when I do, I
will be looking for *them*. If some popular package stops working then I
would be happy to find a fork, because now I can just tell cabal about it.
And if the original gets fixed, I can go back. I don't think people who
fork are looking for aquiring yet another package to maintain forever, or
to take it over.



On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>



-- 
Markus Läll
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20140516/870a5d58/attachment.html>