On 19 December 2010 17:44, Greg Weber
Michael Snoyman and I were discussing the need for beta releases of Yesod and he encourage me to post this to the cafe. Beta releases could be built into the hackage system. However, this can be viewed as a more general problem of distributing multiple versions of code (stable vs. experimental, forks, etc). This is a problem that has been largely solved by version control, but in this instance just needs some integration with an installer system.
The first system I want to add is to allow cabal-install to install from tarballs identified by a URL, e.g. cabal install http://example.org/~me/foo-1.0.tar.gz As you know, .cabal files can specify source repos so in principle one could write a tool to install from a source repo. In practice there are a number of things to solve involving how you manage local caches of remote repos etc. The easiest thing to get working first is installing from tarball URLs, but I would welcome patches for the source repo feature, in particular a specific plan for how users interact with the system. Duncan