I’ll throw in my $0.02: IIUC, the deal with Hackage, much in the spirit of free software, is “as-is” - anyone can upload software, but it’s up to you, the “user”, to decide what to do with it, which packages to use, and whether they meet your desired quality standards. If you don’t like acme-everything
, don’t use it.
Reverse dependency tracking, then, is a secondary feature of Hackage - useful, yes, popular, also yes, but still secondary. The thing that is arguably broken is not the fact that acme-everything
exists, or that it lives on Hackage, but the workflows and tools that break because of it. This is like building slower airplanes because the departure board at the airport is broken.
So what I would like to know is what exactly the problem is that removing acme-everything
would solve. I suspect the problem here is that Hackage’s reverse dependency feature does not capture the information you would like: it gives you “literally any package on Hackage that depends on this package”, whereas what you want is “any serious package that depends on this package”, for some definition of “serious” (“something that isn’t a joke”, “something that people use for real-world software”, “something that’s mature”, “something that meets a certain quality standard”, etc.). But Hackage can’t do that, because that would require a decision on what “serious” should mean, and that’s not what Hackage is - it’s not a curated list of high-quality non-joke packages, it has always been low-threshold, on purpose, leaving the curating to other means.
On a more political note: requests like these, to me, highlight a certain friction in the open-source ecosystem at large. On one side, there’s the “scratch-an-itch” demographic, developers who share code they wrote with an “as-is” understanding - “use it as you wish, but if it’s broken, that’s your problem”. On the other side, we have a heavily commercialized software industry that has developed a habit of using open-source packages with an implied assumption of maintainership and accountability - “I’m using this code for a mission-critical system, so that means someone must take responsibility for it” (but few are willing to actually pay anyone for that responsibility). And this request here smells a bit of the latter.