[Moving to haskell-cafe, not really library specific any more] Hi, Am Sonntag, den 17.04.2011, 12:39 -0700 schrieb Jason Dagit:
In this specific case, I'll do what I can to clean things up but your request makes me pause and think that the debian packaging for cabal packages is not automated enough. As haskell developers it seems a little odd to me that we need to consider the cost of creating new packages for the sake of debian. I like debian, so please don't take that the wrong way :)
the observation is correct, but unfortunately hard to change – Debian is large, slow moving, and unlikely to change policies for a corner-case such as Haskell libraries. Also, the policies that make life a bit more harder for us are also the policies that make Debian a good distribution: E.g. manually creating a copyright file describing who all has copyright on the files, and what license the files are under – .cabal has fields for that, but unfortunately, they very often do not reflect the reality of the .hs files. Or the other one, requiring that an upload of a source package is accompanied by a manually built and signed binary package ensures that the maintainer actually checked that the package builds and hopefully has tested it. If you think more about it, the lack of some of the policies on Hackage, e.g. nobody checking that licenses and copyright are correctly specified and actually compatible with dependencies, make Hackage a dangerous source for serious users. I am not saying that this should change, but the cheapness of Hackage uploads has its downsides. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner e-Mail: mail@joachim-breitner.de Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de ICQ#: 74513189 Jabber-ID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de