portability and .cabal files?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2007-11-25 at 18:07 +0000, Claus Reinke wrote:

> having lots of packages is no good unless they work
> on your platform, and being explicit about which
> platforms a package does not (currently, for lack
> of porting, or ever, for hardwired dependencies)
> work is the first step toward improving the situation.

Yes.

> i'd much rather have hackage tell me which packages
> are usable with my platform (build-reports verifying
> .cabal file accuracy), than tell me how many people
> on other platforms are using those packages without
> caring about portability to other platforms!-)

Absolutely, I'd like to see this too. My proposal is along those lines,
that we use cabal-install to gather test feedback and that hackage
should collect and summarise that data. It's not trivial however, it
needs quite a lot of infrastructure.

I opened a bug on it the other day:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/184


Duncan