Comments on: 2009: The Year Of Hackage

By: andrew u frank

andrew u frank — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:54:59 +0000

I am in a similar situation - i sometimes fix packages from hackage for my own use but i have not figured out a convenient way to feed back the changes. for example, i would have saved time when the fix on haskelldb were in hackage when i searched for a haskell db connection (i use now HDBC).

i method with keeping fixes contributed but not yet tested separate from the 'unstable' last version of the developers, but still making them available in hackage when required would be helpful.

another solution could be to automatically add a wiki page to every package; contribution (fixes) could then be put there and would be available to others running into the same problems.

By: Cabal-install is awesome | Alson Kemp

Cabal-install is awesome | Alson Kemp — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:10:39 +0000

[...] also: 2009-The Year Of Hackage and A Plea For [...]

By: dragan gajic

dragan gajic — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:12:02 +0000

nixos.org has functional package management system that essentially versions all the deps together

By: alson

alson — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:44:44 +0000

Ganesh,

I tend to agree, but there's got to be a happy middle ground. See Frederik's comment: here's someone who could contribute, but is looking for an easy way to do so. Something like GitHub would allow him to update his repository very easily and the Hackage team could decide that his repo represents the current released version. Not a perfect solution, but then Haskell is a young-ish language and can't necessarily adopt Debian's development framework yet...

Frederik,

Really!? Color me impressed. I've had similar experiences with libraries and have usually decided not to go through the hassle of figuring out how to ship patches back. That's why I'm sorta-advocating the GitHub thing, which would make it very easy to send your patches back to your own 'forked'-version of the library. Thereafter the maintainer could pull the patch or the library could be switched to pull from your 'fork'.

Unless you're sending back your patches, I would still vote that HaskellDB be marked as only functional with GHC 6.6. I firmly believe that, once someone dips their toe into the Haskell swimming pool, they generally get turned off by the difficulty of building libraries.

By: frederik

frederik — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:26:30 +0000

As for haskelldb: I'm using it with GHC 6.10.1. I fixed the cabal files and some imports in the source files of the haskelldb package and three of its dependencies and it works. But I didn't contact the package maintainers yet and I think I shouldn't upload the packages to hackage without contacting all of them first...

By: Ganesh Sittampalam

Ganesh Sittampalam — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:01:18 +0000

I think automatically pulling from development repositories to hackage is exactly the wrong thing to do in terms of stability. Perhaps if hackage supported different "streams" (stable/unstable) it might make more sense but there'd still be issues with version numbers and the like as people don't bump the version number with every single checkin.