cabal-upload & cabal-install

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 09:45:28PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> 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.

I think slowly building the user base among early adopters (as now) will
be the most useful.  There's a GSoC project to extend the web interface,
which will involve changes and the risk of temporary breakage.  We won't
be ready for everyone till after that.

As far as I know, the main thing missing from cabal-install is
documentation.  There's a tricky issue of how it should relate to
a system package manager, but that will have to wait.

> 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.

Sounds like a great idea.  Another possibility is to have buildbots
feeding this info back for all packages.