[Haskell-cafe] Idea for a tool

[Michael Snoyman]

Alright, the tool is up and incredibly basic right now. Go to:
http://packdeps.haskellers.com/, type a search string, and hit enter.
The site will filter through all of the cabal files for the most
recent releases of each package and select the ones where your search
string appears in the package name, maintainer and/or author fields.

>From those packages, it will check to see if there are any
upper-bounds restrictions excluding a package. The results are
returned as an Atom feed, so you can easily add this to a reader or
maybe even sign up for email alerts[1].

Let me know if there are any bugs, eventually I'll put up some proper
information on the page describing what's going on there. Oh, and the
package database gets refreshed every 6 hours.

Michael

[1] http://www.feedmyinbox.com/

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
> Well, here's an initial, ugly version of this tool. Feed it two
> command line arguments: a cabal file, and the 00-index.tar file in the
> .cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org folder. More work to follow.
>
> Michael
>
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:25 PM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> I want this tool. I fake it slightly by using my RSS reader and
>> http://page2rss.com/ to get notified when any packages I depend on
>> change, which basically works - but if you could provide a better
>> service (ideally integrated in to hackage), I'd use it.
>>
>> Thanks, Neil
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:27 AM, Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I saw a quote from Eric Kow via Neil Mitchell[1] that we don't spend
>>>> enough time writing tools. Well, I've decided that the most annoying
>>>> part of package maintainership right now is staying on top of new
>>>> versions of dependencies. We essentially have two options right now:
>>>>
>>>> * Follow the PVP and put an upper bound on all dependencies, and
>>>> people will be upset when your package only works with the old version
>>>> of the dependency.
>>>> * Skip the upper bound, and risk having your code break when there's a
>>>> new version.
>>>>
>>>> I have an idea for a tool: you give it a list of packages you
>>>> maintain, or even better yet, you give it your email address and it
>>>> gets that list automatically. Then is looks through all your
>>>> dependencies and sees if you have any upper bounds preventing newer
>>>> versions from being used. Bonus points for making it a web service
>>>> that just gives you an RSS feed.
>>>>
>>>> If anyone's interested in writing a tool like that, let me know.
>>>> Otherwise, next time I'm twiddling my thumbs I'll try to throw it
>>>> together. I've never dealt directly with the Cabal library, but
>>>> there's a first time for everything. If someone else wants to write
>>>> that tool and wants help sticking a web service on it, let me know.
>>>>
>>>> Michael
>>>>
>>>> [1] http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2010/10/enhanced-cabal-sdist.html
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
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>>>>
>>>
>>> This would be a nice feature for the new hackage server:
>>> http://sparky.haskell.org:8080
>>>
>>> Bas
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>>>
>>
>