Hello Isaac, Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 5:42:48 PM, you wrote:
Do we want to permit unsupported forks? I am not convinced they are a good idea.
imho, we are going too deep into this topic. there are even proposals to force developers to answer emails :) We have AUTHORS field which should list everyone contributed to the package just for copyrighting purposes. and we have MAINTAINER field for the person(s) which are ready to accept patches, feature requests and ask dumb user questions. that's all if one uploading package know person which maintains package in above-mentioned meaning, he declare that person in .cabal file. if noone is expected to support the package, it may be mentioned too non-maintainers shouldn't upload new versions of maintained packages without written ;) maintainer permission. well, as far as maintainer answers their letters it should be ok to fork existing maintained library Foo as SuperFoo and leave it unmaintained - sometimes we write just for fun (things useful for other haskellers) i think that Hackage should be database of ALL packages, and other ways should be used to distinguish between better and worse ones (such as download count, maintainer field, version, last update time...) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com