Hello good Haskell Hackers. We're pretty well along the way to getting cabal-install and friends working nicely. We've got almost 30 packages in the database. Let's imagine something that would be awesome. A set of Haskell packages which are all known to work together with a particular version of cabal (the one that GHC comes with), and a particular version of GHC. GHC version 6.6 will be released soon, and I think we should try to make this happen. Currently, we have a set of 27 "unstable" packages. They may or may not work with each-other and such: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/ I just created an empty directory "testing". I propose that we start testing packages, starting with the cabal release candidate that'll go into GHC 6.6, and make sure they work nicely together. Once they're known to work, we can migrate them from the "unstable" directory to the "testing" directory. Once we have a sufficient collection of packages, and once ghc 6.6 is released, we can make a snapshot of this directory, call it "stable-6.6" or something. Then if you have ghc 6.6 and cabal-install, you should be able to "cabal-install p" for any package, and it'll definitely work. So what will we need for this to happen? 1. An installed version of ghc 6.6 on the hackage/darcs server. Maybe in a chroot or something. Maybe from the nightly build tree or the previous snapshot? 2. Some initial set of packages (maybe just cabal-install) to start off. 3. Some script that goes through and builds all of the "unstable" packages in dependency order. I think cabal-install can do this already. In fact, it would be ideal if we used cabal-install for this. 4. The script should also run ./setup haddock and ./setup test. If the packages seem to work w/ 6.6 and the other packages in "testing", it should get migrated from "unstable" to "testing". 5. A web interface (lemmih is working on it) 6. A script to upload packages to "unstable" (Paolo is working on it). 7. Someone to spearhead all of this! peace, isaac p.s. here are the packages we have currently in the database: parsedate-2006.6.4 Haskell library for parsing dates and times cgi-2006.8.5 A Haskell library for writing CGI programs HDBC-odbc-1.0.1.0 lambdabot-4.0 bzlib-0.2 Compression and decompression in the bzip2 format HDBC-sqlite3-1.0.1.0 hask-home-2006.3.23 Generate homepages for cabal packages XmlRpc-2006.6.26 hnop-0.1 Haskell No Operation fps-0.7 HDBC-postgresql-1.0.1.0 rss-2006.7.12 A library for generating RSS 2.0 feeds. HTTP-2006.7.7 Crypto-3.0.3 DES, Blowfish, AES, SHA1, MD5, RSA, X.509 Identity and Attribute Certificates, General ASN.1 Support, Base64, PKCS8, PKCS1v15, Hexdump, Support for Word128, Word192 and Word256 and Beyond, PKCS5 Padding, Various Encryption Modes e.g. Cipher Block Chaining all in one package.plugins-1.0 fastcgi-2006.8.5 A Haskell library for writing FastCGI programs zlib-0.2 Compression and decompression in the gzip and zlib formats HDBC-1.0.1 xhtml-2006.7.5 A Haskell XHTML combinator library darcs-graph-0.1 gd-2006.7.12 A Haskell binding to a subset of the GD graphics library hmp3-1.1 Djinn-2005.12.14 A haskell proof generator iconv-0.2 Perform character set conversion exif-2006.7.11 A Haskell binding to a subset of libexif HaXml-1.13.1 Utilities for manipulating XML documents