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