The main reason I don’t like head.hackage it not even that.
head.hackage is a pool of patches from different authors and I as an end-user have no easy way of knowing whether those patches are:
- correct
- have been submitted upstream
- have been approved upstream
You don’t even write such information in the patch header: patches/lens-5.2.3.patch · master · Glasgow Haskell Compiler / head.hackage · GitLab
To me that is enough reason to prefer going through all the PRs and issue trackers and cooking up source-repository stanzas instead.