[Haskell-cafe] non-hackage cabal repos? unpacking non-repo package tarballs?

[Christopher Done]

On 2 November 2010 19:02, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
> 1. The simplest approach would be if cabal could expose
> its internal 'unpackPackage' as a command, so that
>
>   author: cabal sdist
>   user: cabal unpackPackage Example.tar.gz
> [...]
> 2. Failing that, I remembered that cabal used to be designed
> without a fixed package repo address, and a little digging
> found options --remote-repo and --local-repo, as well as
> the directory layout for package repositories:
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageDB
>
> So this scenario seems possible, in principle:
>
>   author: expose a package repo http://myrepo
>   user: cabal --remote-repo=http://myrepo fetch Example

Both examples sound nice. I am also interested in which can be done.

Whence Hackage 2.0 comes out, it may be possible to upload a Hackage
package that's more of a demo and then cabal install clausreinke/foo,
perhaps. I know there will at least be a separation of package types
in terms of stability. I suppose this as it seems wise to keep as much
Haskell code available in the central Hackage server as reasonably
possible, it's done nothing but serve the Haskell ecosystem well so
far, I think. I think in the general case right now, people tend to
create a Github repo, or so I have observed, and that hasn't seemed to
have a negative effect, so maybe it's not a big deal at all, to
distribute examples in Cabal packages.