[arch-haskell] keeping in sync

[Fabio Riga]

2012/11/30 Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org>
>
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Ramana Kumar <ramana at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> > [haskell] and [haskell-web] are out of sync at the moment.

I would say that github repository of [haskell] is out of sync with
[haskell], so [haskell-web] can't be updated.

> > Do we have a mechanism in place whereby we only push changes publicly if
> > they are all compatible with each other?

No, we haven't.

> Yes, that's exactly what `cblrepo` does through its package database.
> Of course it only does this with the packages in a single database,
> there is no support for multiple databases.  There is not even any
> support for merging databases.

We don't need to merge databases. `cblrepo` is a very cool tool, but a
single human can reasonably manage 150 packages, more or less. If we
want a bigger, almost complete haskell repository (do we?) we need to
work in team.

> > I suppose the right way to do this would be to only offer one endpoint repo,
> > which combines the results of all the small repos people are maintaining.
>
> Please elaborate a little more on the details of how that would work.
> I'm more than open to making changes to `cblrepo` in this direction if
> necessary.

This are my suggestions:

1. Magnus keep a [haskell-base] repository. This MUST be an Arch repo
in sync with a github repo.
2. Both repositories (Arch and git) should be available for
maintainers of other repository.
3. Maintainer of [haskell-web] (me) MUST update it's repo to keep in
sync with base in a reasonable time.
4. After this time a “global maintainer” (Magnus, Ramana, me, whoever)
can grab all packages from both repositories and put them in a new
one: [haskell]
5. Only [haskell] is intended for end users.

A “reasonable time” could be 3 days. I saw that Magnus updates the
repo on Wednesday and on Saturday/Sunday: so before the next update
[haskell-web] should be in sync.

I developed [haskell-web] in a way that it will not duplicate packages
from [haskell]: I use them as DistroPkg. Updating is easy with
`cbladmin` [^1], there's no need to modify `cblrepo`, maybe you could
merge (and develop) some ideas from there. But this is not the main
point. The main point is to be in sync, or else I'm just wasting my
time, as [haskell-web] will never be really useful.

Fabio

[^1]: https://github.com/EffeErre/habs-web