[Haskell-cafe] Experiences with cabal-install and Hackage

[Thomas DuBuisson]

Not to discourage this brainstorming, but many of what people think to
be "new ideas" are being implemented by a GsoC student [1] already.
Yay!

>>> I've rather recently started to use cabal-install to install packages
>>> from Hackage.  Unfortunately, so far many packages fail to install.  I
>>> try to email authors/maintainers, but when I check build logs on
>>> Hackage, I discover that some of these packages have failed building for
>>> some time.

The hackage build logs can be misleading - many system specific
packages may or may not build on hackage because it just isn't the
right OS.  Still other packages require particular C libraries that
the hackage server doesn't have.  For these reasons the build reports
will come from end developer systems (see linked blog).

>>> Wouldn't it make sense to provide automated notification of the package
>>> author when a package fails to build?  I certainly would like to know
>>> about it, but of course, I never remember to check back to see.

Yes, but because this comes from the cabal-installer vs hackage there
was more work needing done.

>> How about taking it one step further, actually "hiding" unmaintained
>> packages after a grace period?

Talk to Gracenotes and Coutts - they can be found on #hackage frequently.

Cheers,
Thomas

[1] http://cogracenotes.wordpress.com/