[Haskell-cafe] Hackage 2 maintainership

[Ben Gamari]

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.

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.

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).

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.

It seems that this process will go something like this,
  1) Bring Hackage trac back from the dead
  2) Bring up a Hackage 2 instance along-side the existing
     hackage.haskell.org
  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

This will surely be a non-trivial process but I would be willing to move
things forward.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2012-January/008427.html