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

[Eugene Kirpichov]

Well, I thought about these 10's of emails too; probably hackage could
send an email when a new broken build arrives but only if there were
no 'unresolved' broken builds before this one; or probably an email at
the first broken build and a weekly email reminding "you've got some
unresolved broken builds".

As for missing C libraries: could cabal probably integrate with the
native package manager (apt/rpm/..) and ask the user whether to invoke
it to install these libraries in case they are missing? However, this
is not a solution for Windows since there's no native package manager.

An easier solution might be to add a (flag-dependent)
"broken-build-message" field to .cabal files, where authors could put
useful info to be printed when a build breaks, like, "have you
installed libpcre?" or "please see troubleshooting.txt".

/me promises to do some cabal tickets from the 'easy ticket list'
after the last exam

2009/1/15 Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk>:
> On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 09:49 +0300, Eugene Kirpichov wrote:
>> Would be nice if after a failed build cabal asked whether or not to
>> upload its log immediately, and (on the hackage side) this led to an
>> email being sent to the maintainer.
>
> It should not be quite that synchronous but yes that's the general idea.
>
> Packages can fail to install for many reasons that are not the fault of
> the package author, for example missing C libraries. Also, I think
> maintainers would not be pleased to receive 10's of emails per day! :-)
> I think in practise it will have to be opt-in for package
> authors/maintainers and it should only send aggregated information (like
> "it appears not to work on windows with ghc-6.8").
>
> Duncan
>
>
>