Hackage is flooded with old package versions reuploads

[Greg Weber]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 2:51 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org> wrote:

> Just to clarify: the source tarball are *never* modified to specifically
> make sure hashes don't randomly change (which would trip all sorts of
> warnings for distribution packagers). In fact, there's also a
> `cabal get` option if you want to unpack with the original unaltered .cabal
> file:
>
>     --pristine    Unpack the original pristine tarball,
>                   rather than updating the .cabal file
>                   with the latest revision from the
>                   package archive.
>

Why is this option needed if the tarball is never modified?
This documentation states that cabal modifies the cabal file on the local
system.

We all appreciate Herbert's efforts. The problem is the tools he is working
with are limited.
The local cabal should operate the same way as hackage: always keeping the
meta-data separate.

Please correct me if I am mis-representing the situation.
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