Themes for 1.22

Thu Apr 24 11:33:11 UTC 2014

Hi Johan,

Not sure if this mail is a request for comments, but on the story for large
projects one thing that I would like to see is the ability to add packages
that aren't in hackage to the depends list. I agree that adding some
scanning and auto add ability is definitely sorely needed, but this
information goes into add-source-timestamps in the sandbox folder, and if
you blow away the sandbox, it's gone. Or you can try and version a file
that contains ever changing timestamps. Right now I have a shell script
that maintains a list of added sources and I keep that versioned in the
project. It would be nice to have git dependencies in there as well, and
then disallow a hackage upload for any cabal file with a non-hackage
dependency listed. I would be happy to contribute time to both design and
implementation.

Ben

On Thu Apr 24 2014 at 10:53:59, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> While I'm sure we still have a bugfix release or two to make on the 1.20
> branch, I thought it'd be worth looking at what we want to accomplish for
> 1.22. Here are my thoughts on what we should focus on:
>
> ## A dependency solver that always works
>
> As Hackage has grown so have the requirements of the dependency solver.
> There are three distinct problems I'm seeing now that we should tackle:
>
>  * Treat each sections (i.e. library, test suite, benchmark, and
> executable) in the .cabal file separately for the purpose of dependency
> resolution. Today all the sections' dependencies are merged and used as the
> constraints of the package as a whole. This is troublesome for all packages
> that are dependencies of QC, HUnit, test-framework, and criterion, as
> there's a dependency cycle if you treat e.g. the containers package and its
> test suite as one unit.
>
>    The solution here is to treat each unit as a mini package for the
> purpose of dependency resolution. This would also allow you to have e.g.
> several executables with conflicting dependencies.
>
>  * Improve performance. Some packages (e.g. yesod) can take over 10
> seconds to run over. This problem will get worse as Hackage grows and we
> build bigger applications on top of it, so we need to tackle this now
> before it becomes a real problem.
>
>  * Fix Hackage package blacklisting. Users can blacklist packages on
> Hackage e.g. if they know them to be broken. However, this doesn't really
> work as the Hackage blacklist translates to a soft preference in the
> dependency solver and is thus often ignored. See
> https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/1792 for the gory details.
>
> ## Do the right thing automatically
>
> This is a carry-over from the 1.20 goals, as we didn't make much progress
> here.
>
> The focus here should be on avoiding manual steps the cabal could do
> for the user.
>
>  * Automatically install dependencies when needed. When `cabal build`
> would fail due to a missing dependency, just install this dependency
> instead of bugging the user to do it. This will probably have to be
> limited to sandboxes where we can't break the user's system
>
>  * GHCi support could be improved by rebinding :reload to rerun e.g.
> preprocessors automatically. This would enable the users to develop
> completely from within ghci (i.e. faster edit-save-type-error cycle).
> We have most of what we need here (i.e. GHC macro support) but someone
> needs to make the final change to generate a .ghci file to pass in the
> ghci invocation.
>
> ## Faster builds
>
> I think we're almost done here. There's really only one remaining thing to
> do:
>
>  * Build components and different ways (e.g. profiling) in parallel.
> We could build both profiling and non-profiling versions in parallel.
> We could also build e.g. all test suites in parallel. The key
> challenge here is to coordinate all parallel jobs so we don't spawn
> too many.
>
> ## Support large projects
>
> This is also a carry-over from the 1.20 goals.
>
> We still don't have a good story for large projects. Sandboxes are too
> annoying to use if there are 100 add-source deps. We need more automation
> and more opinionated defaults (e.g. scan the sub-directories from in which
> cabal was run to find source packages.)
>
> What we need most of all here is a design. Perhaps we could try to get
> together at some Hackathon/ICFP and discuss.
>
> ## Issue tracker spring cleaning and test suite improvements
>
> The issue tracker is out-of-hand. It's too unwieldy to use for planning
> our work and get an overview of the most important issues. We should try to
> close down bugs that haven't had updates in years with extreme prejudice.
> If the issue is important it will pop up again.
>
> We're also severely lacking in the testing department. There are two
> problems:
>
>  * There aren't enough tests: the cabal user facing surface is quite
> larger (lots of features and flags) and many of them are not tested at all,
> which will lead to regressions as we keep fixing bugs and adding features.
>
>  * The tests take too long to run: we have too many end-to-end style tests
> (i.e. build a whole package) and not enough unit style tests. We need to
> add more of the latter kind.
>
> Cheers,
>   Johan
>
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