On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 10:05 +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
As a few people have noted, we need to agree a policy in this area. As I see it, the drivers are:
* users need to know whether what they're downloading is supported, and if so by whom. * maintainers are entitled to control what goes out in their name. * allocating version numbers for a particular package name should be the prerogative of the maintainer.
When something is agreed, I propose to put it on the hackageDB upload page and expect people to follow it. Here's my first attempt:
If the Maintainer field names a person or group, the release as a whole (including packaging) is the named maintainer's approved release, which they are supporting (at least for some time after the release). Ideally a maintainer would make that clear by uploading the release themselves.
A Maintainer value of "none" indicates that the package is not supported.
If a package is being maintained, any release not approved and supported by the maintainer should use a different package name. Then use the Maintainer field as above either to commit to supporting the fork yourself or to mark it as unsupported.
Looks good to me, except that I think I agree with Gwern that an empty maintainer field is better than a distinguished value like "none". We can always make the web page note that the package has no maintainer. If on the other hand everyone thinks "none" is a good idea then we should make hackage upload enforce that the maintainer field is not empty. Duncan