[Haskell-cafe] real haskell difficulties (at least for me)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 00:22 +0100, Manlio Perillo wrote:
> Duncan Coutts ha scritto:
> > On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 19:20 +0000, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> > 
> >> I vividle remember Dons repeatedly telling me that I should try out 
> >> [some package who's name escapes me], and then discovering that it 
> >> doesn't actually work on Windows at all. (Couldn't this critical 
> >> information be included somewhere prominent on Hackage??)
> > 
> > This critical information should be provided on each package page on
> > Hackage. It's not quite as trivial as it looks however.
> > 
> > If you'd like to help out, we're working on a new hackage-server that
> > allows users to upload build reports. That way we hope to discover
> > automatically which packages do and do not build on various platforms.
> > The basics work but we need more help in polishing it up.
> > 
> 
> Do you know buildbot?
> http://buildbot.net/trac

Yeah, it's great for some kinds of projects. For example it's used for
ghc. However it is very centralised, synchronous and needs ssh on
Windows.

What we've implemented is using cabal-install to generate build logs and
summary info and to upload that to the hackage server. The advantage is
that we should get an order or two magnitude more results than if we
used a handful of buildbots. It also means we do not have to administer
the buildbots, people can administer their own cabal-install setups. We
don't need to care so much about individual results if we have enough
results.

We plan to have two reporting modes, anonymous with minimal info, and
non-anonymous with full build logs. So far we've got both but have not
separated them yet.

Duncan