Re: Hackage is flooded with old package versions reuploads

On Mon, 2015-01-19 at 09:59 -0500, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 7:06 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:

...

The reason I wouldn't be happy is that the effects of a "broken" package (especially the more popular it becomes) can't be contained easily. The

I wonder if Hackage can be extended to support an out-of-band "broken" flag that can be applied to such packages, and cabal-install then refuse to use those packages (possibly with an option to override).

This can be achieved by editing the .cabal file, and Herbert has done so in at least one case. It's just a matter of making the constraints impossible, e.g. base > 1 && < 1. It could possibly be done more obviously or directly, e.g. adding a dep on something impossible (though note that we don't currently allow adding deps). Deprecation is orthogonal I'd say. People may need to rely on deprecated packages while they migrate away. Duncan