Package spam :-)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 20:38 +0100, Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
> Here is another view: The use of a cabal field to indicate orphan seems wrong to me.
> 
> The maintainer field in the cabal file currently indicates who was responsible 
> for and interested in such things as bug reports and patches at the time of the 
> release of that version of that package.

Right.

> The orphan state is associated with the package's basename, not any given 
> version of the package. I think of "orphan" vs "non-orphan" as associated with 
> promised future versions of the package.  In an extreme case, the orphan status 
> could change several times in a day.  Things at this level of abstraction should 
> be tracked by a future version of hackage.

Yes. I agree. It's not even necessarily the author themselves that would
necessarily mark a package as obsolete or without maintainers or
whatever. It might be some other person doing package collection
maintenance (a job rather like what distro packaging people do).

Duncan