[Haskell-cafe] cabal dependency on code repositories.

[Duncan Coutts]

On 19 December 2010 17:44, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:
> Michael Snoyman and I were discussing the need for beta releases of Yesod
> and he encourage me to post this to the cafe. Beta releases could be built
> into the hackage system. However, this can be viewed as a more general
> problem of distributing multiple versions of code (stable vs. experimental,
> forks, etc). This is a problem that has been largely solved by version
> control, but in this instance just needs some integration with an installer
> system.

The first system I want to add is to allow cabal-install to install
from tarballs identified by a URL, e.g.

cabal install http://example.org/~me/foo-1.0.tar.gz


As you know, .cabal files can specify source repos so in principle one
could write a tool to install from a source repo. In practice there
are a number of things to solve involving how you manage local caches
of remote repos etc. The easiest thing to get working first is
installing from tarball URLs, but I would welcome patches for the
source repo feature, in particular a specific plan for how users
interact with the system.

Duncan