Another API stability plea

[Conrad Parker]

On 23 August 2010 11:36, Ashley Yakeley <ashley at semantic.org> wrote:
> On 2010-08-11 13:18, John Goerzen wrote:
>>
>> I'm writing because there was an API change in a point release. This is
>> violating our convention and the Platform policy.
>
> I wonder if this could be checked automatically by the Hackage upload
> process?

I think it'd be useful for Hackage to check this automatically, but I
think it should be part of the archive management not part of the
upload process.

As has been randomly suggested before, it would make sense to use a
model like Debian's of having mulitple parallel archives
(experimental, unstable, testing, stable), where packages are migrated
from one to the next after some automated testing. The current Hackage
policy would roughly correspond to Debian experimental -- a staging
area from which some autobuild system tries to find packages which it
can promote to unstable without breaking it.

It may take a while (eg. overnight) to discover that an upload to
experimental breaks some other package, and during that time there may
be other uploads. I think it's better to allow developers to upload to
an experimental staging archive and for Hackage to run overnight
checks on the whole archive, than to pretend Hackage can find
breakages instantly and disallow the upload of a package.

cheers,

Conrad.