Package spam :-)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 19:01 +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> >  > Yes. I agree. It's not even necessarily the author themselves that would
> >  > necessarily mark a package as obsolete or without maintainers or
> >  > whatever.
> >
> > On a slightly related note, I would be more likely to fix my broken
> >  packages on hackageDB, if hackageDB automatically sent me an
> >  email when a package breaks.
> 
> Me too! Or when new warnings get added to the hackage system which
> would cause a warning on a new upload, or when haddock or GHC fails to
> build the package.
> 
> York University has a particularly effective way of ensuring everyone
> uses valid HTML, by sending an email once a week if there is any
> invalid HTML. Perhaps this would be going too far, but alerting
> maintainers to the problems would be handy.

Yes. Once our data on build outcomes is of sufficient quality to not
just annoy everyone then I think we should have hackage email
maintainers.

At the moment we only check packages once at upload time and never
again. Also even when they do fail, as often as not it's not really the
package author's fault (eg diamond dep errors, missing C libs).

Duncan