agreeing a policy for maintainers and hackageDB

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

> I'm still hoping that someone will make Hackage able to support user 
> reviews and ratings, so that well-engineered packages get the good 
> feedback they deserve, and stand out from the crowd.

  As Chris Kuklewicz explains in the other thread "package spam", an 
unmaintained package is often not generated by someone who uploads a new 
version where only the Cabal field Maintainer is removed or changed to the 
empty string. Actually a package most oftenly becomes unmaintained by 
being not updated for a long time. Thus I think the time of the last 
release, the highest compiler version it is tested with and so on may be 
sorting criteria for finding out the most up-to-date packages.
  If nevertheless an unmaintained flag should be managed, this should be 
part of HackageDB (like user reviews), not part of Cabal. But then I 
wonder who shall decide whether a package is maintained or not. Sometimes 
users are afraid that a package is unmaintained because there was no new 
release for half a year, although patches are constantly committed to a 
darcs repository.