Ross Paterson
Björn Bringert suggested that the Hackage page for a package should include a link to the Darcs repo (if any, but who uses anything else?) and maybe some darcs integration such as changelogs and the like. To make this work, we'd need a URL-valued Darcs-Repository field in the package description.
I'm all for it. I'd love tighter integration with darcs. FYI, I think that's what some people use the package-url for. We could also do a "pull" for such packages and host a version of the repo on hackage. If there's no darcs-repository, we could just create one so we'd have a local version. It would be great if Hackage could some day become the "public" repo for many darcs projects, without having to give folks login accounts. I picture a place where people can send patches (packagename@hackage.haskell.org), and the owner(s) of the repo would have a UI for browsing and accepting / applying patches. Signed packages by approved folks would get applied automatically. Cabal-install could have a --get-repo option, so when the user fetches the source, they get a darcs repository. In Debian, the maintainers are distinct from the upstream developers, and the same might be true in Hackage. Debian uses tarred patches to maintain the differences between the trees, but we could use darcs. If a package sits unmaintained for a while... maybe the upstream author has stopped applying patches, then people could volunteer to take over the package or fork it. To some extent these are juts darcs user interface ideas, but I think that the combination of a version control system and a package manager has a lot of possibilities. So many possibilities :) peace, isaac