new hackage-server testing host

[Duncan Coutts]

Hi Ross, (and other people interested in the hackage server)

I've got ports 80 and 8080 open on the community sparc server and will
be using it as a host for testing the new hackage-server implementation.

http://sparky.haskell.org:8080/


One thing I noticed when importing data into it is that there are a
small handful of packages that have no entry in the upload log. The new
server expects to find such an entry so that it knows when the package
was added.

Ross, the packages in question I think are the ones that you uploaded
after ghc-6.10 was released including base, containers etc. I'm guessing
that the normal hackage upload rejected them with some QA complaints and
that you had to add them by a manual process.

I'm hoping we can just fix the upload log data by appending the
appropriate lines to the upload log, eg by doing:

echo 'Thu Apr 9 16:25:43 UTC 2009 RossPaterson base 4.1.0.0' >> log

Does that seem reasonable? It means those lines would be out of order
chronologically, but I don't think that is important. If you think this
is reasonable then I'll get you the proper checked list of missing
uploads.

The other alternative might be for the current hackage server to let us
download a tarball of all the package meta-data including the tag files,
and we could adapt the new hackage-server to import from that format.
Hopefully though we only need to take this approach if we start making
much more use of the tag files.

Duncan