[Haskell-cafe] I think we should stop "fixing" other people's packages on Hackage silently

MarLinn monkleyon at gmail.com
Thu Jun 22 18:19:19 UTC 2017


> At the very least, we should make sure that each revision is 
> accompanied by an upstream PR if it is for the latest release (or any 
> other still supported branch) and the project is hosted on some VCS 
> service that supports PRs.
>

Why "and" instead of "if"?

A VCS is certainly a good idea. But a (public) VCS service? Why? Keep in 
mind that Github and its clones are only one of many options for 
software management. So why force maintainers to keep up with yet 
another service if they don't really want or need it? That only reduces 
the number of willing contributers and forces people into systems that 
they won't really use, so it wouldn't even solve the problem.

I get the sentiment, but if email is good enough as a last-stage 
PR-queue for the Linux Kernel, we should allow package maintainers the 
same. If that makes it harder for them to integrate changes, that's 
their problem. (But one could always use a format that's easy to parse.)

Bonus: automatic "PR's" via email should be dead-easy to implement and 
maintain compared to all alternatives.

Cheers,
MarLinn



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