[Haskell-cafe] Hackage 2 maintainership

[Ben Gamari]

Krzysztof Skrzętnicki <gtener at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Are there any news how things are going?
>
Things have been pretty stagnant yet again. I was more than a bit
over-optimistic concerning the amount of time I'd have available to put
into this project. Moreover, the tasks required to get Hackage into a
usable state weren't nearly as clear as I originally thought.

Unfortunately, those who have historically been very active in Hackage
development and would have been responsible for much of the recent work
in advancing Hackage 2 to where it is now have other demands on their
time. My understanding is there is a fair amount of half-completed code
floating around.

> What remains there to be done to get us to Hackage 2?
>
> I found this list of tickets:
> https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues?labels=hackage2&page=1&state=open
>
> Is there anything more to be done?
>
This list is definitely a start. One of the issues that was also
realized is the size of the server's memory footprint. Unfortunately
acid-state's requirement that all data either be in memory or have no
ACID guarantees was found to be a bit of a limitation. If I recall
correctly some folks were playing around with restructuring the data
structures a bit to reduce memory usage. I really don't know what
happened to these efforts.

On the other hand, it seems that the test server is still ticking away
at http://hackage.factisresearch.com/ with an up-to-date package index,
so things are looking alright on that front.

At this point, it seems that we are in a situation yet again where
someone just needs to start applying gentle pressure and figure out
where we stand. I'm afraid especially now I simply don't have time to
take on this project in any serious capacity.

Perhaps one way forward would be to propose the project again as a GSoC
project next year. That being said, there is no guarantee that someone
would step up to finish it.

Just my two cents.

Cheers,

- Ben