Hackage: Dep bound notifications and uploader endorsements for new users

#1

This is a quick reminder about recently added Hackage features that I contributed, that I think could be useful.

Dependency bound notifications

@sclv in the GHC status report session at HIW '23:

You can go to your account settings, turn on all these e-mail notifications: that will let you know, for example, if a dependency is updated in such a way that it breaks the bounds of a package that you are maintaining.

I think it was @bgamari who asked:

Is there going to be a blog post about the notifications?

And @sclv replied:

We did announce it on Discourse.

Here is the link for that announcement: New Hackage Server Features - #38 by janus

But to reiterate and make sure everyone knows:

I do recognize that Hackage is hard to navigate and it isn’t easy to discover when features are added. But this is what I’ve managed to implement.

Endorsements

In case the Hackage admins become unavailable, there is now a way to have new users obtain ‘uploader’ rights through endorsements, inspired by Arxiv, I believe. This was first deployed within the last month. If people are onboarding new Haskellers you might want to try this out.

After the user is added, established uploaders can go to the page

https://hackage.haskell.org/user/<username>/endorse

If two separate users endorse the new user, the new user gets the ‘uploader’ group and they can upload packages. Please don’t endorse arbitrary strangers. Remember that the Hackage database is mostly append-only.

This page is currently not linked to from anywhere, I am not sure if it should be linked yet. But I’d love to hear some feedback. I can’t promise I’d get the time to implement an improvement any time soon though.

EDIT: Page is linked, see sclv’s reply below.

screenshot of /user//endorse page
screenshot of /user//endorse page2028×368 39 KB

17 Likes
#2

This feature is great! I signed up to it a few weeks ago and already got one notification.

#3

thank you for implementing this great and long needed feature!!

#4

We actually went through and updated some hackage pages and emails with the endorsement email.

Endorsement is now described on the new account creation page: Register a new account | Hackage

Further, when users register, the link they can send to endorsers is part of the confirmation email they will be sent.

I hope this can ease the ongoing workflow burden on hackage trustees. Thanks to Janus for working on all this!

2 Likes
#5

Can someone explain it? I don’t really understand what exactly is meant.

#6

Is the text of the option itself helpful?

my maintained package doesn’t accept the version of the newly uploaded or revised dependency

For example, if you depend on filepath < 1.5 and then filepath-1.5 is released then, under that option, you will get a notification. (That’s why I was notified about stan's filepath dependency recently).

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