On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Conrad Parker
I think we should avoid manual approvals; I know several people who have excellent, working, used in-production, cabalified Haskell code but for whatever reason they are reluctant to request an account -- however they have code on github.
A key difference of course being that github has a two-level namespace for projects. Allowing random users to upload code only really becomes a problem
when poorly named or insecure packages pollute the global namespace;
Just to be clear: this is already a problem. A substantial amount of the stuff on Hackage today is junk. I don't actually mind there being crufty packages, but their number undoubtedly makes it very hard to find packages that are genuinely interesting or useful. And then there's the compounding factor of a package being listed under every category that its author tagged it with. Since we lack any means of filtering, searching for, or nominating "good" packages, it's kind of a backhanded blessing for now that more people can't, or choose not to, upload packages.