Another API stability plea

[Conrad Parker]

On 23 August 2010 14:08, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
<ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 August 2010 13:07, Conrad Parker <conrad at metadecks.org> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> What do you mean by "archive management"?

I meant the management of archives (experimental, unstable etc.) by Hackage.

> I believe the point of having it in Hackage as part of the upload
> process rather than part of the "cabal upload" command (or "cabal
> check") is that having it as part of Hackage means that they checks
> can be maintained reliably and transparently without assuming all
> contributors have the very latest version of cabal-install, and that
> if extra dependencies (e.g. haskell-src-exts) is needed to perform
> these checks then they don't become dependencies of cabal-install.

yup, I agree with that :)

> Also, this can be pre-checked before uploading:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/upload.html

Yes, those things that can be pre-checked before uploading should be.
This corresponds to something like lintian for Debian
(http://lintian.debian.org/).

Conrad.