Re: [Haskell-cafe] The instability of Haskell libraries

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

Keith Sheppard writes:

...

Set up a server to poll the "Source-Repository head" of every hackage package that includes one in it's cabal file, then rerun the build any time a change is detected. This may be a good excuse to implement a pluggable continuous integration server in haskell too along the lines of what Hudson is for java... maybe an idea for the next GSoC

Several problems with this:

1) Is this going to support every VCS under the sun?

We only need to support 3 or 4 to get 99% of the stuff on Hackage that lives in a VCS at all.

2) Not all head repositories are kept stable/buildable at all times.

Perfect, meet better. Wait, no no - aw goddammit Perfect! Why do you do this every single time? *You* get to mop the floor this time.

3) I can see this getting expensive wrt space and network usage.

Not really. I do much the same thing locally. Most repos hardly ever change. My own local repos - which includes all of patch-tag, a few GHCs, some intermediate builds, and whatnot - is about 4.5G. By my calculations* that's about 25¢ of hard-drive space. * http://forre.st/storage#sata -- gwern