[Haskell-cafe] cabal dependency on code repositories.

[Greg Weber]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> 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
>

Being able to install a tarball is a great first step and would provide a
mechanism for taking care of some of the use cases.

In terms of specific user interaction plans for installing from a repo, I
would point again to ruby's Bundler as a starting point. Basically instead
of putting in a version number constraint one can put in a git url. That url
points to a repo with a gemspec (.cabal file) which has the version number.
It is important to note that Bundler operates and a project-focused manner.
Bundler also creates a file 'Gemfile.lock' which lists every package being
used for the project and its exact version. This helps when working in a
team or deploying- by checking in this file one can ensure that everyone
else (and the production server) is using the *exact* same versions of
packages. For library development it is not recommended to check in the lock
file. Changing the Gemfile (cabal file) and installing (cabal configure)
will update the lock file.

This functionality is similar to the tool capri in some ways, but instead of
having a project private package set it just has a lockfile that specifies
exact versions. I think haskell may require a project private repo because
it compiles packages instead of interpreting them. For a project private
package set in Ruby there is a tool called RVM which has a feature called
'gemsets'. The main purpose of RVM though, is actually to be able to easily
switch between multiple versions of Ruby (and it does this amazingly well by
operating at the shell level).

I am rambling now, but the end user interaction is essentially just editing
the Cabal file with the proper git url and re-compiling. The releaser does
not have to do anything either- they don't even have to change the version
number in the cabal file. Ruby Gems and Bundler use the git hash of the repo
as the version number. However, Bundler still knows the package version
number for dependency resolution.

Greg Weber
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