Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

On Thu, 2012-04-19 at 11:12 -0400, Ryan Newton wrote:

Hello all,

Right now I'm trying to answer a simple question: * Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit from the donation of a dedicated VM with good bandwidth/uptime? Whoever already knows how to do this could configure it.

In trying to answer the above question I found this long email thread from 1.5 years ago. Duncan said the following:

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote: That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can run a mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is what about having public mirrors that are used automatically or semi-automatically by clients.

Are there any updates to this in the last year? Is anybody running a mirror?

Yes, we're running a public testing instance of the new hackage server at: http://hackage.factisresearch.com/ It has live mirroring running. This is in a VM donated by factis research, at least on a temporary basis to help with the testing of the new hackage server code. I think the answer for the longer term is still yes. We have not yet discussed with Galois if the new hackage server should be hosted on their infrastructure. The new code does take more resources and is not based on apache, so it may not be appropriate to host it on the same machine as is currently used. There's two options I think: 1. a machine for the central hackage server, 2. a machine for doing package builds The former will require more organisation, partly because we need the haskell.org people to have some degree of control over the system. The latter is easier because the design allows for multiple clients to do builds rather than just one central machine. So all that requires is a user account to upload the data. (plus the small matter of a working build bot client software, which is where scoutess may help) Duncan