On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 18:35 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2008 Sep 10, at 17:51, Duncan Coutts wrote:
dependent packages don't get confused when it's re-released. If we're considering modifying hackage's versioning, we should probably decide if we want/need this now instead of having to add it in later when something major goes *boom*.
We've thought about this and we think we do not need epoch numbers since we're in the lucky position of doing the upstream versioning.
Are we? I think the package author has final say if a package needs to be backed off, and any packages released between the rollback and the next release with dependencies on the backed-off package will be problematic, no matter how draconian hackage's version checking is. (This is a different situation from datecode versions as in the trac ticket.)
I'm not quite sure I follow. Certainly it's the author/maintainer who decides the version number. It's up to them to pick it, but they know the ordering of version numbers. As I understand it, epochs were mainly introduced to cope with un-cooperative upstream maintainers whereas here maintainers already have to specify a version number in the Cabal/Hackage scheme and there's no way for them to pretend or unilaterally declare that 3 < 2 or any other such silliness. To account for having experimental versions available at the same time as stable versions we're planning to let maintainers add a suggested/soft version constraint. Is that related to what you mean by "backing off" and "rollback"? Duncan