Ross Paterson
As I understand it, a package collection, like
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/unstable/
has the structure
00-index.tar.gz <pkg>/ <pkgid>.cabal <pkgid>.tar.gz ...
where 00-index.tar.gz tars up all the <pkg>/<pkgid>.cabal files. Such a simple structure makes it easy to add tools.
That's right.
Perhaps it could be made simpler by replacing the index with a file that was just a concatenation of the .cabal files with some separator (say @), and having both gzipped and uncompressed versions.
That's an idea. I wonder what xerox and ducan think.
The main missing piece seems to be a means of uploading packages. Any plans there? Perhaps something along the lines of PAUSE (http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#What_is_PAUSE), except that we only need to upload Cabal tarballs.
Currently the means of uploading files is by using the 'cabal-put' tool that's on the hackage.haskell.org server. You have to have an account on that machine in order to upload packages. The idea behind that is to just get something working among folks we already trust. Something like PAUSE would be good :) peace, isaac