cabal-upload & cabal-install

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2007-05-04 at 00:27 +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 09:45:28PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > What do we need to do next? Should we invite a little bit of wider
> > testing on cabal-install + hackage and get some user feedback. If that's
> > good we should actively advertise and push it.
> 
> I think slowly building the user base among early adopters (as now) will
> be the most useful.  There's a GSoC project to extend the web interface,
> which will involve changes and the risk of temporary breakage.  We won't
> be ready for everyone till after that.

Right, sure. So just get Haskell hackers using it for the moment,
hackers who are tolerant of a bit of churn.

> As far as I know, the main thing missing from cabal-install is
> documentation.  There's a tricky issue of how it should relate to
> a system package manager, but that will have to wait.

I think it should default to --user-install. Partly just because this
means it'll "Just Work"tm for everyone without supplying additional
options and without confusing error messages (like /usr/local:
permission denied).

> > This would be a great way to do distributed testing and a way of finding
> > out which packages are well used and tested. If summary info is on the
> > website it also allows users to find out if a package is likely to work
> > on their machine.
> 
> Sounds like a great idea.  Another possibility is to have buildbots
> feeding this info back for all packages.

Although the number of people we ought to be able to get using
cabal-install is probably orders of magnitude greater than the number we
can get as buildbot clients.

Duncan