[Haskell-cafe] A little bit OT: Google as a global directory/resolver for cabalized packages?

[Isaac Jones]

Dimitry Golubovsky <golubovsky at gmail.com> writes:

> If one tries to search Google:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=exposed-modules+version+filetype%3Acabal&btnG=Search
>
> it returns URLs of all Google-indexed .cabal files (currently 7- just this few?)

That's certainly not all of them.  Just in the fptools tree we have:

Cabal.cabal
GLUT.cabal
HGL.cabal
HUnit.cabal
HaXml.cabal
OpenAL.cabal
OpenGL.cabal
QuickCheck.cabal
Win32.cabal
X11.cabal
arrows.cabal
base.cabal
fgl.cabal
src.cabal
haskell98.cabal
monadLib.cabal
mtl.cabal
network.cabal
parsec.cabal
unix.cabal

> So if one makes such a request from a program, then parses the resulting
> HTML extracting <a> tags containing links ending with ".cabal", it
> would result in a directory of .cabal files locations suitable for
> furter processing. Similarly, if all locations of a particular package
> need to be found, package name needs to be added to the query string.
>
> Using Google API might be an alternative, but it returns only up to 10
> results (per their docs) which might be enough to find all mirrors of
> a single package, but not the whole list of available packages.
>
> Publishing in such a directory might be simple: just place one's
> .cabal file in a place where Google can index it.
>
> One weakness: too easy to spam.

We could possibly overcome that by using the cryptographic signing
process similar to what I implemented for apt-secure in Debian.  I've
already talked to Lemmih a bit about this and he's working on it.  Not
sure if cabal-get really wants to troll google, though :)

peace,

  isaac