ijones suggestions for HAC07

[ijones]

 About Hac07.

Here is a list of suggestions from Isaac about what needs to happen to get Hackage off the ground. Above all, though, you hackers should make it your own!

Isaac proposes two high-level goals. See details below:

1. "Finish" Hackage, version 1.0
2. Make a proposal to Isaac / Galois about the server needs for Hackage. We cannot give too many people root or login accounts on haskell.galois.com; There is too much mission-critical software there. At the same time, we'd like to support many smaller projects; every few days someone asks for someplace to host their darcs repo!
   1. should the Hackage system be both a package database AND a (darcs?) hosting site for Haskell-related projects?
   2. who should have root access to this machine (might inform later questions)
   3. who should have user accounts on this machine
   4. should it live on Monk (with the same set of sysadmins that exist now)
   5. should we get a new machine and / or use a virtual colocated machine ( http://vcolo.com or somesuch). we could add more root users this way
   6. what should the machine be used for?
      1. host projects with darcs
      2. host hackage
      3. host gforge
      4. host trac
      5. host community blogs, etc
   7. what should the machine be called
      1. hackage: migrate current hackage.haskell.org stuff?
      2. darcs: migrate current darcs stuff?
      3. community.haskell.org: the machine for the people
      4. haskellforge: or whatever.

over-all tasks to improve adoption

It's great to write good code, but that doesn't mean people will use that code! How do we get Hackage adopted? (See also Isaac's  packages-6.6 blog entry.)

1. create and maintain precise instructions for exactly what to do to find and install packages.
2. simply upload as many cabal packages as you can find
3. use it ourselves, note problems, fix them.
4. and make sure that you can actually install them with cabal-install
5. once you have a set of packages that can be installed, works with a known version of cabal (and GHC?) move them to "testing" as described  here.

cabal-install

Cabal-install is currently living in a darcs branch as described in CabalWithInstall?. Its basic functionality is good.

Some tickets that may or may not be up to date.

1. integrate the cabal-with-install branch into the mainline Cabal source tree
   1. fix up the makefile so that "sudo make install" installs both the cabal library and cabal-install
   2. what about cabal-setup? does cabal-install currently use it? if so, we should install that as well.
2. play with cabal-install, discover its shortcommings and add tickets to this trac
   1. and remove any out-of-date tickets that you find.
3. user interface tweaks. does it work well? is it smooth?
4. cabal-install install cabal-install should smoothly upgrade itself :)
5. pick a very complex package with lots of dependencies and make sure cabal-install works for it.
6. can hackage itself be installed with cabal-install?

cabal-put

Cabal-put is currently a script living on the hackage.haskell.org server. This is nice because people we already know & trust can upload stuff into hackage w/ cabal-put.

1. make a web front-end for uploading? (Ross P. has considered some security ideas)
2. remember who uploaded, make them the maintainer? or have the idea of a hackage maintainer separate from the upstream maintainer?

Hackage DB

The collection of packages lives  here. Debate topic: Should Hackage be just the database of packages and the UI (which would be great) or should it expand to be a (darcs?) hosting platform for projects?

1. front-end for viewing, searching, querying the package repository. Lemmih has done good work here, check with him! His front end does work with the new repository layout!
2. integration with darcs?
3. integration with trac? (each new package is a component?)

[duncan]

Almost all of this is done. We have community.haskell.org doing the hosting and hackage.haskell.org doing the package distribution. cabal-install now works fairly well and cabal-upload/cabal-put has been integrated.

Is there anything left that should be filed as a separate ticket?