On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 10:49 AM, Peter Simons
Hi Jan,
Submitting devel:languages:haskell (or devel:languages:perl:CPAN) unattended-ly is worrying.
devel:languages:haskell is a curated package set that's compiled and maintained specifically with the goal of providing a stable subset of Hackage (the equivalent of CPAN in the Haskell ecosystem) that's both robust, well-tested, and reliable for use in commercial products. The LTS package set on which d:l:h is based is hugely popular among Haskell developers and it is the de facto standard for developers involved in non-trivial projects. Releases of LTS Haskell undergo extensive quality controls, i.e. there are comprehensive test builds, regression test suites, a semi-automatic system for reporting issues to the respective upstream package authors, and much more. Generally speaking, the quality of most of most of those packages is amazing, and many popular software products like git-annex, yesod, etc. are built on top of that infrastructure. Having that code available in openSUSE is an extremely useful service to our users, and the availability of that infrastructure is certainly going to attract new users who would previously not consider openSUSE because it was lacking comprehensive support for LTS Haskell.
Why can't those people just add the repository, then? That is what most languages in openSUSE seem to do. They have a curated set of packages that are considered widely useful to the openSUSE community in Factory, and a repository containing more niche packages that people who need them can add if necessary.
I find it highly questionable to submit every possible bitrotten Hello World module on the planet that has ever been made. That is certainly what it feels like.
I understand that the sheer number of submissions must feel scary to everyone who's involved in the package review process. Please know, however, that the work you're doing is extremely valuable for openSUSE, for the Haskell community, and for the free software community as a whole. The effort we have all dedicated to distributing that software to our users has already made a huge difference, i.e. we've found literally hundreds of bugs in packages, package descriptions, licensing term declarations, etc. and those issues have been *fixed* because of the work we're doing.
But why does that work need to happen in Factory, rather than in the repository? There are currently 1,164 "ghc-*" packages in Factory, compared to 892 "python-*" packages, 357 "ruby*" packages, 1,092 "perl-*" packages, 193 php packages, 23 lua packages, and 37 "R-*" packages, despite the fact that those other languages are much more popular than haskell [1]. All of them have a repository people can add with many more packages. So it seems to me a smaller list of generally-useful packages in Factory combined with a dedicated repository for people who need it would best balance the needs of haskell users with the time constraints of Factory reviewers. [1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org