non-maintainer uploads to hackageDB

Ross Paterson ross at soi.city.ac.uk
Sun Feb 24 19:35:58 EST 2008


I think we need, perhaps not a policy, but some agreed etiquette regarding
uploads to hackageDB.  (Please hold off on the technical suggestions
until we've decided what behaviour we want.)

Personally, I'd rather have all maintainers doing their own uploads.
As I user, I'd like to know that someone takes responsibility for the
whole of a package I download, including the packaging, and will be
available for bug fixes and enhancements (such as making it work with
the next GHC release).

As this is free software, there's nothing to stop someone forking a
package and maintaining their own version.  Then as a user I'll need
to choose between the two, but I'll still be looking for a maintainer
of the whole package.  It might be fair to ask that someone creating a
fork change the name of the package in some way, to avoid confusion
(and eating up the original maintainer's version numbers).

This is a different situation from Linux or BSD distributions, where
primary releases are repackaged to conform with native conventions.
HackageDB is an upstream site, where people can make their own releases,
using a common package format (Cabal).  (Similarly I don't think we
need the pristine+patches setup used by those distributions: maintainers
should just take care of the pristine.)


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