Marking packages deprecated

[nibro]

There should be a way to mark a package as deprecated so it doesn't show up on the main Hackage listing.

If a newer package, with the same name, is uploaded then the older packages will in effect be defunct. But if you don't have a newer package with the same name, there is currently no way to "get rid of" packages that are no longer valid. There may be several reasons for why you would want to do this, likely most often because the contents of the package are superceded by functionality in some other package, with a different name.

[duncan]

It'd be easy to add a deprecated/superseded-by tag to the package tags file on hackage. Using that on the package list page and the individual package page should be reasonably straightforward. What is a good less clear is what kind of user interface to use to let people set/update that information.

I'd suggest initially not providing any UI to set the tag, so initially it'd need a hackage admin to set the tag directly.

So without a UI to set the tag this should not be too hard, so I'm marking it as such. Patches are invited.

[guest]

The "Safe" package has been superseded by the "safe" package, and it would be nice to indicate the explicit upgrade path.

[chrycheng]

Complete proposed patch

[chrycheng]

Was also thinking of whipping up a quick Haskell program to automate the task of tagging deprecated packages. Input would be list (or lines) of pairs where fst is the package to be deprecated, and snd is Nothing if the superseding package is not known.

Will this help? Or will tagging be done as deprecated pages are reported?

[ross]

fixed some time ago by chrycheng's patch.

[elga]

*  virgin mobile