agreeing a policy for maintainers and hackageDB

[Bulat Ziganshin]

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

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