agreeing a policy for maintainers and hackageDB

Ross Paterson ross at soi.city.ac.uk
Mon Jun 23 05:05:59 EDT 2008


As a few people have noted, we need to agree a policy in this area.
As I see it, the drivers are:

* users need to know whether what they're downloading is supported,
  and if so by whom.
* maintainers are entitled to control what goes out in their name.
* allocating version numbers for a particular package name should be
  the prerogative of the maintainer.

When something is agreed, I propose to put it on the hackageDB upload
page and expect people to follow it.  Here's my first attempt:

	If the Maintainer field names a person or group, the release as
	a whole (including packaging) is the named maintainer's approved
	release, which they are supporting (at least for some time after
	the release).  Ideally a maintainer would make that clear by
	uploading the release themselves.

	A Maintainer value of "none" indicates that the package is
	not supported.

	If a package is being maintained, any release not approved and
	supported by the maintainer should use a different package name.
	Then use the Maintainer field as above either to commit to
	supporting the fork yourself or to mark it as unsupported.


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