agreeing a policy for maintainers and hackageDB

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 10:05 +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
> 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.

Looks good to me, except that I think I agree with Gwern that an empty
maintainer field is better than a distinguished value like "none".

We can always make the web page note that the package has no maintainer.

If on the other hand everyone thinks "none" is a good idea then we
should make hackage upload enforce that the maintainer field is not
empty.

Duncan