2010/4/5 Jonas Almström Duregård
This being said, I have no problem with this restriction. In fact, trying to determine the origin of code before agreeing to distribute it sounds like sound procedure.
How so? What does knowing the real name of some code's author tell you that merely knowing the author's pseudonym doesn't? Particularly when the information is still unreliable, since any rigorous verification of identity is likely far more trouble than anyone would want to deal with here, and any individuals who want to misuse hackage will be the ones most motivated to deceive. Not to mention that pseudonymity is overwhelmingly the norm on the internet. In general, unless it has some reasonable justification like handling credit cards, a site demanding real names would make me highly suspicious about what they wanted to do with the information. In practice, of course, I trust hackage--given that I download and execute code from it--but deviating from standard expectations for no apparent reason is rather peculiar. For what it's worth, a quick web search indicated no such requirement for uploading packages to RubyGems or the Python cheese shop, and they seem to do okay.
When I registered I was prompted to verify my identity by means of my university email (as opposed to my gmail account), which would complicate using a pseudonym.
I don't have a hackage account, since I'm fairly new to Haskell and none of my projects are yet in a sufficiently complete state to warrant distribution. I'd most likely want to use my real name anyway, but being specifically required to do so is a bit off-putting, and having to verify it (A pseudonymous gmail account isn't good enough? Really?) would quite possibly irritate me enough to decide it isn't worth it. I do this for fun, after all. Is the purpose of hackage to be an open community package index that encourages general contributions, or something more limited?