agreeing a policy for maintainers and hackageDB

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.06.24 18:29:03 +0400, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> scribbled 1.3K characters:
> Hello Isaac,
>
> Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 5:42:48 PM, you wrote:
>
> >> Do we want to permit unsupported forks? I am not convinced they are a good idea.
>
> imho, we are going too deep into this topic. there are even
> proposals to force developers to answer emails :)
>
> We have AUTHORS field which should list everyone contributed to the
> package just for copyrighting purposes. and we have MAINTAINER field
> for the person(s) which are ready to accept patches, feature requests
> and ask dumb user questions. that's all
>
> if one uploading package know person which maintains package in
> above-mentioned meaning, he declare that person in .cabal file. if
> noone is expected to support the package, it may be mentioned too
>
> non-maintainers shouldn't upload new versions of maintained packages
> without written ;) maintainer permission. well, as far as maintainer
> answers their letters

And how would we handle the case where the package is fully maintained, but the maintainer hates Cabal & Hackage and would never give permission? Does the maintainer have eternal veto power over uploads?

> it should be ok to fork existing maintained library Foo as SuperFoo
> and leave it unmaintained - sometimes we write just for fun (things
> useful for other haskellers)
>
> i think that Hackage should be database of ALL packages, and other
> ways should be used to distinguish between better and worse ones
> (such as download count, maintainer field, version, last update time...)
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com

As I've indicated elsewhere, I'm a strong supporter of this view. It is better from a long-term view: personal websites are hard to find, they are evanescent, and the opposite view induces great friction and transaction costs. Filtering out packages is easy; but there is no library to undelete information, no way to recover packages purposefully deleted or discouraged from ever being on Hackage.

--
gwern
MI6 SISDE 36800 Waihopai ple SP4 illuminati FSF cracking rico
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