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. 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.
One longer term thing I was thinking about was using hackage and cabal-install to gather testing feedback. We could have cabal-install report (with user consent) build successes and failures, including useful info about the environment, including the platform, Haskell implementation and version, the version of cabal, cabal-install and versions of the all the dependent packages (not sure if it should be directly or transitively).
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.