[Haskell] URLs in haskell module namespace

[Simon Marlow]

On 22 March 2005 13:03, Lemmih wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 06:40:02 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time), S.
> Alexander Jacobson <alex at alexjacobson.com> wrote:
>> I don't understand.  Are you saying that there will be only one
>> Hackage server ever and it will have all information about all
>> packages everywhere and that the location of this hackage server will
>> be hard coded into every cabal implementation?
> 
> Hackage and (the soon to come) cabal-get are tools layered on the
> Cabal but they are not a part of it.
> Hard coded URLs are evil in almost every context, IMHO. But defaulting
> to some server when the user hasn't specified otherwise would greatly
> increase the ease of use.
> 
>> If so, I find that vision incredibly unappealing.  I believe there
>> should/will be multiple hackage servers with carrying different
>> hackages under control of different parties (e.g. a corporation might
>> have one for its own private code).
> 
> The idea with Hackage was to create a central place for people to put
> software or links to software, so keeping only one server for free (as
> in beer) packages would be desirable. However, this does in no way
> limit how Hackage can be used for private code repositories.

It might make sense in the future to be able to express package names as
URLs, with the default being relative to http://www.haskell.org/packages
(or wherever).  eg. in your .cabal file you could say

 BuildDepends: http://example.org/haskell-packages/foo >= 1.0

Cheers,
	Simon