Haskell Packages 6.6?

[Isaac Jones]

Hello good Haskell Hackers.

We're pretty well along the way to getting cabal-install and friends
working nicely.  We've got almost 30 packages in the database.

Let's imagine something that would be awesome.  A set of Haskell
packages which are all known to work together with a particular
version of cabal (the one that GHC comes with), and a particular
version of GHC.

GHC version 6.6 will be released soon, and I think we should try to
make this happen.

Currently, we have a set of 27 "unstable" packages.  They may or may
not work with each-other and such:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/

I just created an empty directory "testing".  I propose that we start
testing packages, starting with the cabal release candidate that'll go
into GHC 6.6, and make sure they work nicely together.  Once they're
known to work, we can migrate them from the "unstable" directory to
the "testing" directory.

Once we have a sufficient collection of packages, and once ghc 6.6 is
released, we can make a snapshot of this directory, call it
"stable-6.6" or something.  Then if you have ghc 6.6 and
cabal-install, you should be able to "cabal-install p" for any
package, and it'll definitely work.

So what will we need for this to happen?

1. An installed version of ghc 6.6 on the hackage/darcs server.  Maybe
   in a chroot or something.  Maybe from the nightly build tree or the
   previous snapshot?

2. Some initial set of packages (maybe just cabal-install) to start
   off.

3. Some script that goes through and builds all of the "unstable"
   packages in dependency order.  I think cabal-install can do this
   already.  In fact, it would be ideal if we used cabal-install for
   this.

4. The script should also run ./setup haddock and ./setup test.  If
   the packages seem to work w/ 6.6 and the other packages in
   "testing", it should get migrated from "unstable" to "testing".

5. A web interface (lemmih is working on it)

6. A script to upload packages to "unstable" (Paolo is working on it).

7. Someone to spearhead all of this!


peace,

  isaac


p.s. here are the packages we have currently in the database:

parsedate-2006.6.4       Haskell library for parsing dates and times
cgi-2006.8.5             A Haskell library for writing CGI programs
HDBC-odbc-1.0.1.0
lambdabot-4.0
bzlib-0.2                Compression and decompression in the bzip2 format
HDBC-sqlite3-1.0.1.0
hask-home-2006.3.23      Generate homepages for cabal packages
XmlRpc-2006.6.26
hnop-0.1                 Haskell No Operation
fps-0.7
HDBC-postgresql-1.0.1.0
rss-2006.7.12            A library for generating RSS 2.0 feeds.
HTTP-2006.7.7
Crypto-3.0.3             DES, Blowfish, AES, SHA1, MD5, RSA, X.509 Identity
and Attribute Certificates, General ASN.1 Support, Base64, PKCS8,
PKCS1v15, Hexdump, Support for Word128, Word192 and Word256 and Beyond, PKCS5
Padding, Various Encryption Modes e.g. Cipher Block Chaining all in one package.plugins-1.0
fastcgi-2006.8.5         A Haskell library for writing FastCGI programs
zlib-0.2                 Compression and decompression in the gzip and zlib formats
HDBC-1.0.1
xhtml-2006.7.5           A Haskell XHTML combinator library
darcs-graph-0.1
gd-2006.7.12             A Haskell binding to a subset of the GD graphics library
hmp3-1.1
Djinn-2005.12.14         A haskell proof generator
iconv-0.2                Perform character set conversion
exif-2006.7.11           A Haskell binding to a subset of libexif
HaXml-1.13.1             Utilities for manipulating XML documents