[Haskell-cafe] State of the Hackage: Q1, Q2 2010

Matthew Gruen wikigracenotes at gmail.com
Thu Jul 1 23:32:07 EDT 2010


On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
>> I think we need to standardise the presentation of this data, and
>> provide a lib to access it.
>
> This, together with reverse dependencies[1], would be a nice feature
> for the upcoming hackage-server.
>
> Regards,
>
> Bas
>
> [1] http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~roel/hackage/packages/archive/revdeps-list.html

It would be! Presently, in hackage-server, modules can sign up for an
IO hook that executes whenever a package is downloaded. Here's what's
left to do:

1. Make a data structure that has all of the download information in a
useful form, with a feature that updates it (including csv backup)
2. Write a parser to migrate Apache logs to this form (didn't Galois
already write a parser, actually? [1])
3. Establish a URI from which Hackage dumbly serves the download data
(as html, json, etc.) for anyone to study
4. Eventually, analyze the data server-side to add useful bits of
information to the package index

And there's also an upload hook, like hackage-scripts has, so reverse
dependencies can be updated.

—Matt Gruen

[1] http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/23/one-million-haskell-downloads/


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