[Haskell-cafe] Hackage or Where to Host Haskell projects, and simple darcsforge description was Re: Making Haskell more open

Shae Matijs Erisson shae at ScannedInAvian.com
Wed Nov 16 07:50:47 EST 2005


Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang at jeltsch.net> writes:

> Would it be intended that every Haskell-related project is hosted under
> haskell.org?  This might be not so nice.  And it might be not so nice if most
> Haskell-related projects are hosted under haskell.org so that potential users
> might only look under haskell.org for projects and miss those that are hosted
> elsewhere.

Hackage[1] is designed to be the freshmeat and apt-get of the Haskell world.

I have a simple plan for a darcsforge as well:
If Cabal includes a darcs-repository field, developers will be able to upload
their project.cabal file to Hackage or to a darcsforge server.
That server will run darcs pull on the repositories once a night or so.
The developers can include an index.html in their repo that points to a doc/
subdirectory, or is the entire docs and description for simple projects.
That way a single site can host the equivalent of cvs and webspace for darcs.
That site could do http://host/projectname urls for each project.

This is roughly a darcs equivalent to RSS aggregators. It does require that
developers have a publically accessible repo, but anyone can get space from
geocities or angelfire for that.

Advantages of this include:

* easy indexing and searching of projects and sources
* easy references to other darcs/cabal projects
* host needs nearly zero admin effort, notably zero user accounts required.

Disadvantages are:

* no bug tracker
* no mailing lists

Though maybe those could have darcs backends also?

Still, this simple darcsforge has an excellent effort to results ratio.

I hope to have time to add this sort of thing to cabal and hackage soon.

[1] http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/Hackage
-- 
Shae Matijs Erisson - http://www.ScannedInAvian.com/ - Sockmonster once said:
You could switch out the unicycles for badgers, and the game would be the same.



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list