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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