[Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2012-04-19 at 11:12 -0400, Ryan Newton wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> 
> Right now I'm trying to answer a simple question:
>       * Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit
>         from the donation of a dedicated VM with good
>         bandwidth/uptime?
> Whoever already knows how to do this could configure it.  
> 
> 
> In trying to answer the above question I found this long email thread
> from 1.5 years ago.  Duncan said the following:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Duncan Coutts
> <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
>         That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can
>         run a
>         mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is
>         what
>         about having public mirrors that are used automatically or
>         semi-automatically by clients.
> 
> 
> Are there any updates to this in the last year?  Is anybody running a
> mirror?

Yes, we're running a public testing instance of the new hackage server
at:

http://hackage.factisresearch.com/

It has live mirroring running.

This is in a VM donated by factis research, at least on a temporary
basis to help with the testing of the new hackage server code.

I think the answer for the longer term is still yes. We have not yet
discussed with Galois if the new hackage server should be hosted on
their infrastructure. The new code does take more resources and is not
based on apache, so it may not be appropriate to host it on the same
machine as is currently used.

There's two options I think:
     1. a machine for the central hackage server,
     2. a machine for doing package builds

The former will require more organisation, partly because we need the
haskell.org people to have some degree of control over the system. The
latter is easier because the design allows for multiple clients to do
builds rather than just one central machine. So all that requires is a
user account to upload the data. (plus the small matter of a working
build bot client software, which is where scoutess may help)

Duncan