hackage-server: index format

[Antoine Latter]

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 11:16 -0600, Antoine Latter wrote:

>
> I'm not sure I really understand the difference. Whether there is a
> difference in content/meaning or just a difference in the format.
>

Oh my, what an old thread. I'll try an resurrect my state of mind at the time.

I think my main concern was, as you said, a difference in format not a
difference in substance. I also might have thrown in a good amount of
over-engineering as well.

What it comes down to is that embedding relative URLs (or even
absolute URLs) in a tar-file feels like an odd thing to do - I don't
see what advantage is has over a flat text file, and I can no longer
create/consume the tar-file with standard tools.

But maybe this doesn't matter - can we re-state what goals we're
trying to get to, and what problems we're trying to solve? Going back
into this thread I'm not even sure what I was talking about.

Are we trying to come up with a master plan of allowing cabal-install
to interact with diverse sources of packages-which-may-be-installed
data?

I'm imagining the following use cases:

1. hackage.haskell.org
2. a network share/file system path with a collection of packages
3. an internet url with a collection of packages
4. an internet url for a single package
5. a tarball with a collection of packages
6. a tarball with a single package
7. an untarred folder containing a package (as in 'cabal install' in
my dev directory)

With the ability to specify some of these in the .cabal/config or at
the command line as appropriate. There's going to be some overlap
between these cases, almost certainly.

Am I missing any important cases? Are any of these cases unimportant?

The next question would be how much effort do we require of the
provider of a specific case? So for numbers 4 & 5, is the output of
'cabal sdist' good enough? For numbers 2 & 3, will I be able to just
place package tgz files into a particular folder structure, or will I
need to produce an index file?

What are other folks doing? I don't know much about ruby gems.
Microsoft's new 'NuGet' packages supports tossing packages in a
directory and then telling Visual Studio to look there (they also
support pointing the tools at an ATOM feed, which was interesting).

Antoine

> Duncan
>
>