cabal-upload & cabal-install

[Duncan Coutts]

Hia Ross, Bjorn,

Pepe Iborra and I were hacking on cabal-install today. I hope you like
our patches :-). Pepe updated it to use filepath so it'd work on windows
and I fiddled with locations of config and things to try and make
installation simpler so it'll work "out of the box".

I was also trying cabal-upload. I found that cabal-upload needs some
functions from the HTTP lib that are not actually exported. In
particular the stuff to do with authorisation in the Browser module. It
looks like it ought to be exported since it isn't actually used
internally. When I do patch the HTTP lib to export that, cabal-upload
works for me. I uploaded filepath-1.0 today using it.

However I failed to upload Cabal-1.1.6.2 which I also released today.
Via both the website and cabal-upload interfaces it failed the upload
after a few 100k, so I think it's a server side issue. Does it have a
limit on the upload size? cabal-1.1.6.2.tar.gz is just over 500k.

You can grab it here and try:
http://haskell.org/cabal/release/latest/cabal-1.1.6.2.tar.gz



My general impression is that cabal-install, hackage and cabal-upload
are really nice, especially the hackage web ui. You've done a lot of
work!

What do we need to do next? Should we invite a little bit of wider
testing on cabal-install + hackage and get some user feedback. If that's
good we should actively advertise and push it.


One longer term thing I was thinking about was using hackage and
cabal-install to gather testing feedback. We could have cabal-install
report (with user consent) build successes and failures, including
useful info about the environment, including the platform, Haskell
implementation and version, the version of cabal, cabal-install and
versions of the all the dependent packages (not sure if it should be
directly or transitively).

This would be a great way to do distributed testing and a way of finding
out which packages are well used and tested. If summary info is on the
website it also allows users to find out if a package is likely to work
on their machine.

Duncan