October 2011 - cabal-devel

Proposal: Add a benchmark section to .cabal files
by Johan Tibell 06 Oct '11

06 Oct '11

Hi all, Problem ======= After having used Makefiles to build my benchmark suites for quite some time I'm convinced we need support for building benchmark using Cabal. Make doesn't solve the problem of building a benchmarks particularly well. There are several problems: * Building your library using Cabal and your benchmarks using Make sometimes ends up with different package versions being used for the two separate builds, resulting in compilation errors. * Lots of functionality that's already in Cabal is duplicated in Makefiles (e.g. preprocessor rules). * It's hard to get proper incremental compilation; I always use `make -C benchmarks clean all` to rebuild the benchmarks, just to make sure that everything is up-to-date. Proposal ======== Step 1. Add basic support for building simple benchmark suites e.g. modelled after test suite sections: Name: foo Version: 1.0 License: BSD3 Cabal-Version: >= 1.9.2 Build-Type: Simple Benchmark bench-foo type: stdio-1.0 main-is: bench-foo.hs build-depends: base This doesn't add much on top of normal executable sections, except that it tells Cabal that this isn't an executable it should build by default or install. Step 2. Add a detailed benchmark interface that allows the benchmark to associate a real valued *measure* (optionally with upper and lower bounds) with a benchmark name. Benchmark naming would work like test naming (e.g. group/subgroup/name). This would allow us to track performance over time. Step 2 needs to be fleshed out some more, but I think we can get quite a lot of bang-for-the-buck with step 1. Cheers, Johan

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Re: [Hackage] #282: profiling versions of libraries not managed well
by Hackage 04 Oct '11

04 Oct '11

#282: profiling versions of libraries not managed well ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Reporter: SamB | Owner: Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: cabal-install tool | Version: 1.2.3.0 Severity: normal | Keywords: profiling Difficulty: hard (< 1 day) | Ghcversion: 6.8.2 Platform: | ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Changes (by bgamari): * cc: bgamari@… (added) -- Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/282#comment:9> Hackage <http://haskell.org/cabal/> Hackage: Cabal and related projects

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Hackage 2.0: JSON resources?
by Max Bolingbroke 04 Oct '11

04 Oct '11

Hi Cabalers, I'm working on a bot to produce build reports and upload documentation for Hackage 2.0. This bot needs a way to determine whether a particular package already has documentation uploaded or not. One possibility would be to have the bot download the package HTML page and scrape the information out by examining the module tree. However, scraping HTML is ugly - it would be nicer to expose a machine-readable resource like http://localhost:8080/package/process.json that I could retrieve and extract the relevant information from. Is this something you want in Hackage 2.0? If so, is it OK to implement it by copying+modifying servePackagePage, then adding the new resource in the HtmlFeature? I see a commented-out reference to a "JsonFeature", so perhaps you had another implementation in mind? Max

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