[Haskell-cafe] External query interface to HackageDB?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 10:26 -0400, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is there any way to query the latest version of a particular package
> stored on Hackage, that was successfully built?

It is certainly part of the plan. There is currently no convenient way
to get at the information. I've been working on the client side of
things, actually generating decent build reports. That step is now done
and it's included in cabal-install-0.5.0. The next step is letting
people upload build reports to hackage and collating the data and
extracting useful information from the data. Included in that would be
some way for external clients to get at the data and summaries both via
human readable info on the package page and something machine readable.

> I mean, not _how_ to do that (I have some ideas that I have to
> download directory listings, looking for failure logs, etc.), but is
> there any tool or interface already available that does similar
> things?

In the mean time, using the current system, you can get at stuff by
knowing what urls to look at. eg:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pureMD5/0.2.0/logs/failure/ghc-6.8

So most recent packages have a logs subdir and either a success or
failure dir with a log file for a particular version of ghc, which at
the moment is 6.6 or 6.8.

> Unfortunately, tarfiles provided on Hackage (like 00-index.tar.gz) do
> not help, e. g. BerkeleyDB failed to build in all three versions, yet
> its all cabal files are included in the tarball:

Yes, the archive is complete. We do not remove anything. In future we
may augment the index with extra meta-data on what works, what is
obsolete or what is recommended.


Duncan