hackage, package list, trac, some suggestions/questions

[Ross Paterson]

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 12:21:21AM +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
> good point. as .cabal files are served as text, they might be
> scanned as well. still, i'd think that hackage should do as good
> mailing list archives do: obfuscate email addresses to make
> harvesting more difficult, without users having to obfuscate
> things by hand.
> 
> if someone figures out how to install the package descriptions
> on their own machine for harvesting, there isn't much to be done
> about that, just as with harvesters registering on mailing lists.
> but one shouldn't make it too easy..

The .cabal file is still inside the tarball, and unpacking archives is
a standard thing for web traversers to do -- no installation necessary.
The only thing that would work is for the upload script to modify the
cabal file inside package, which is something I'm reluctant to do,
because it intrudes on the domain of the maintainer.