On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 20:38 +0100, Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
Here is another view: The use of a cabal field to indicate orphan seems wrong to me.
The maintainer field in the cabal file currently indicates who was responsible for and interested in such things as bug reports and patches at the time of the release of that version of that package.
Right.
The orphan state is associated with the package's basename, not any given version of the package. I think of "orphan" vs "non-orphan" as associated with promised future versions of the package. In an extreme case, the orphan status could change several times in a day. Things at this level of abstraction should be tracked by a future version of hackage.
Yes. I agree. It's not even necessarily the author themselves that would necessarily mark a package as obsolete or without maintainers or whatever. It might be some other person doing package collection maintenance (a job rather like what distro packaging people do). Duncan