On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:02, Malcolm Wallace
My only problem with Hackage is I feel like the maintainer is a fence I have to climb every time I want to upload a bugfix or a non-broken version of the package. I just want to fix it, upload it, and continue with my work.
Unfortunately, experience shows that a gatekeeper is usually necessary. Otherwise random people create and apply patches that break stuff they don't care about, whilst fixing only their immediate problem. Distributed version control, like darcs and git, already lowers the barrier to participation very significantly. But having someone review patches before publishing them to the world at large is widely considered the most effective quality control known in the field of software engineering.
An alternative would be to let people upload forks of a package, similar to how github/bitbucket supports forks on a VCS level. I'm not convinced it's a common enough situation to be worth the hassle though. /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe