[Haskell-cafe] Hackage 2 maintainership

[Simon Meier]

Hi Duncan,

I just wanted to thank you and all the other guys pushing Hackage 2
towards a public release. I just tested the

http://hackage.factisresearch.com/

instance and it's blazingly fast. Cool stuff! The reverse dependencies
are also very useful. I know that sending patches instead of thanks
would help more. I'll try that in a (hopefully) not too distant future
:-)

best regards and thanks again,
Simon


2012/2/14 Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com>:
> Hi Ben,
>
> On 13 February 2012 23:44, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> Those of you who follow the Haskell subreddit no doubt saw today's post
>> regarding the status of Hackage 2. As has been said many times in the
>> past, the primary blocker at this point to the adoption of Hackage 2
>> appears to be the lack of an administrator.
>
> Yes, much of it is lack of an individual to keep momentum up and keep
> everyone else motivated. While I'm keen that hackage moves forward, my
> volunteer time is spread too thin to be that person keeping everything
> organised. That said, where I spend my volunteer time is to a large
> part directed by what other people are doing, it's much more fun and
> motivating if there's other people working with you.
>
> Speaking of which, I spent much of this evening fixing things, more
> details below.
>
>> It seems to me this is a poor reason for this effort to be held
>> up. Having taken a bit of time to consider, I would be willing to put in
>> some effort to get things moving and would be willing to maintain the
>> haskell.org Hackage 2.0 instance going forward if necessary.
>
> That would be great. So in the short term I'm very happy to get the
> help and in the longer term I'm happy to hand over to anyone sensible
> who puts in the effort. That person could be you, someone else or a
> team of several people.
>
> More immediately, my general policy with commit access is to give it
> to anyone who's sent a few good patches. Currently there are 7 people
> with write access to the darcs repo on code.h.o. It is of course also
> fine for people to maintain their own public branches (which they can
> do using git or darcs, whichever).
>
>> I currently have a running installation on my personal machine and
>> things seem to be working as they should. On the whole, installation was
>> quite trivial, so it seems likely that the project is indeed at a point
>> where it can take real use (although a "logout" option in the web
>> interface would make testing a bit easier).
>
> Yes, we're at the stage where we can run a public testing instance.
> You'll see there's a bit more to implement and test for a switchover.
>
>> That being said, it would in my opinion be silly to proceed without
>> fixing the Hackage trac. It was taken down earlier this year due to
>> spamming[1] and it seems the recovery project has been orphaned. I would
>> be willing to help with this effort, but it seems like the someone more
>> familiar with the haskel.org infrastructure might be better equipped to
>> handle the situation.
>
> I spent a couple hours on this this evening and I've finally fixed it
> (I hope). I still need to purge a bit of wiki/ticket spam (help
> apreciated there). Sadly I've had to blow away the previos login
> accounts, but I've semi-restored by copying the ghc trac accounts. So
> if you happen to have an account on the ghc trac, then your login
> should work for the hackage trac. Otherwise you'll need to re-register
> as if it was a new account.
>
>> It seems that this process will go something like this,
>>  1) Bring Hackage trac back from the dead
>
> Check.
>
>>  2) Bring up a Hackage 2 instance along-side the existing
>>     hackage.haskell.org
>
> Yes, now that the trac is back, you can see what notes we have on the
> switchover process at:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageDB/2.0
>
> Note also that the nice people at factisresearch.com have given us a
> VM with enough memory (8GB) for the purpose of running a public test
> with the full package set (in principle it should not need so much
> memory, but we currently keep unnecessary package metadata in memory).
>
> So thanks to you and others this evening motivating me, I've also
> taken Max's latest patches to my tar package (which coincidentally I
> released yesterday) and the corresponding hackage-server patch and set
> it running at:
>
> http://hackage.factisresearch.com/
>
> This is running the latest upstream darcs version. I have also fired
> off a one-shot mirroring operation. This will mirror all the existing
> packages from hackage. It'll probably take half a day or so to
> complete since there's something like 30-40k tarballs to be copied
> over. I'll check the logs tomorrow hopefully and after that kick off a
> live/continuous mirror so it'll get new updates from the main hackage
> within 20-30 min or so.
>
> Last time Max and I tried this we were able to mirror almost all
> packages. Most of the unmirrorable ones at the time were due to
> packages with quirks in their tar format, which is what his tar
> patches were aimed at. So I'm hopeful we'll now have only a tiny
> handful of unmirrorable packages.
>
>>  3) Enlist testers
>>  4) Let things simmer for a few weeks/months ensuring nothing explodes
>>  5) After it's agreed that things are stable, eventually swap the
>>     Hackage 1 and 2 instances
>
> Right, that's more or less it. Other details on the wiki (and if
> there's anything missing, edit it).
>
> You'll see that there are still some missing components. In particular
> while I finished the live mirroring client, and Max has done a doc
> builder client, I think we're still missing a normal build client (one
> would start with Max's doc client).
>
>> This will surely be a non-trivial process but I would be willing to move
>> things forward.
>
> Taking an organisational / management / cheerleader role would be
> imensely useful (as well as technical obviously). I can help because I
> know more or less what needs to be done and I'm very happy to answer
> questions, grant push access etc.
>
> Duncan
>
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