package collection

[Isaac Jones]

Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> writes:

> As I understand it, a package collection, like
>
> 	http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/unstable/
>
> has the structure
>
> 	00-index.tar.gz
> 	<pkg>/
> 		<pkgid>.cabal
> 		<pkgid>.tar.gz
> 	...
>
> where 00-index.tar.gz tars up all the <pkg>/<pkgid>.cabal files.
> Such a simple structure makes it easy to add tools.

That's right.

> Perhaps it could be made simpler by replacing the index with a file
> that was just a concatenation of the .cabal files with some separator
> (say @), and having both gzipped and uncompressed versions.

That's an idea.  I wonder what xerox and ducan think.

> The main missing piece seems to be a means of uploading packages.
> Any plans there?  Perhaps something along the lines of PAUSE
> (http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#What_is_PAUSE), except that
> we only need to upload Cabal tarballs.

Currently the means of uploading files is by using the 'cabal-put'
tool that's on the hackage.haskell.org server.  You have to have an
account on that machine in order to upload packages.  The idea behind
that is to just get something working among folks we already trust.

Something like PAUSE would be good :)

peace,

  isaac