On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 15:34 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
I don't think that's right. The HP maintainers are not (and cannot be) the maintainers of each individual package. That just does not scale.
Oh absolutely, but I was imagining that (at least part of) the purpose of the Platform is to generate automatic notifications to package owners, when a change in either ghc or the packaging infrastructure or the package's dependencies, leads to their own package breaking. So the Platform effectively generates an auto-prompt when maintenance is required.
I hope that this is something that hackage will provide to all packages, including those in the platform.
Given that such a lot of package-breakage is not due to changes in the functionality of the library itself, but purely to changes in the packaging system surrounding it, this would in my eyes shift a certain amount of responsibility in the right direction. :-) (Not the responsibility to fix, but the responsibility to notify.)
As a package author (rather than a user), I would see this as a primary benefit of having my packages added to the Platform. And as a package user (rather than author), there is the corresponding antibenefit of removing a package like HOpenGL from the Platform: a diminished likelihood of the maintainer being already aware of packaging flaws.
I really want to build the platform on the hackage infrastructure and have all packages benefit from additional checks. Then users and maintainers can act on that extra information. It should also make it easier for new packages to join the platform because it'll be easier to demonstrate that the various quality hoops have been jumped through. So yes, we might expect platform volunteers to send occasional patches to keep existing packages working, but really a package being in the platform requires a maintainer rather than guaranteeing maintenance. Duncan