Hi Michael, I want this tool. I fake it slightly by using my RSS reader and http://page2rss.com/ to get notified when any packages I depend on change, which basically works - but if you could provide a better service (ideally integrated in to hackage), I'd use it. Thanks, Neil On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:27 AM, Bas van Dijk wrote:

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

Hi all,

I saw a quote from Eric Kow via Neil Mitchell[1] that we don't spend enough time writing tools. Well, I've decided that the most annoying part of package maintainership right now is staying on top of new versions of dependencies. We essentially have two options right now:

* Follow the PVP and put an upper bound on all dependencies, and people will be upset when your package only works with the old version of the dependency. * Skip the upper bound, and risk having your code break when there's a new version.

I have an idea for a tool: you give it a list of packages you maintain, or even better yet, you give it your email address and it gets that list automatically. Then is looks through all your dependencies and sees if you have any upper bounds preventing newer versions from being used. Bonus points for making it a web service that just gives you an RSS feed.

If anyone's interested in writing a tool like that, let me know. Otherwise, next time I'm twiddling my thumbs I'll try to throw it together. I've never dealt directly with the Cabal library, but there's a first time for everything. If someone else wants to write that tool and wants help sticking a web service on it, let me know.

Michael

[1] http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2010/10/enhanced-cabal-sdist.html _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

This would be a nice feature for the new hackage server: http://sparky.haskell.org:8080

Bas _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Alright, the tool is up and incredibly basic right now. Go to: http://packdeps.haskellers.com/, type a search string, and hit enter. The site will filter through all of the cabal files for the most recent releases of each package and select the ones where your search string appears in the package name, maintainer and/or author fields.

From those packages, it will check to see if there are any upper-bounds restrictions excluding a package. The results are returned as an Atom feed, so you can easily add this to a reader or maybe even sign up for email alerts[1].

Let me know if there are any bugs, eventually I'll put up some proper information on the page describing what's going on there. Oh, and the package database gets refreshed every 6 hours. Michael [1] http://www.feedmyinbox.com/ On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

Well, here's an initial, ugly version of this tool. Feed it two command line arguments: a cabal file, and the 00-index.tar file in the .cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org folder. More work to follow.

Michael

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:25 PM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

...

Hi Michael,

I want this tool. I fake it slightly by using my RSS reader and http://page2rss.com/ to get notified when any packages I depend on change, which basically works - but if you could provide a better service (ideally integrated in to hackage), I'd use it.

Thanks, Neil

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:27 AM, Bas van Dijk wrote:

...

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

Hi all,

I saw a quote from Eric Kow via Neil Mitchell[1] that we don't spend enough time writing tools. Well, I've decided that the most annoying part of package maintainership right now is staying on top of new versions of dependencies. We essentially have two options right now:

* Follow the PVP and put an upper bound on all dependencies, and people will be upset when your package only works with the old version of the dependency. * Skip the upper bound, and risk having your code break when there's a new version.

I have an idea for a tool: you give it a list of packages you maintain, or even better yet, you give it your email address and it gets that list automatically. Then is looks through all your dependencies and sees if you have any upper bounds preventing newer versions from being used. Bonus points for making it a web service that just gives you an RSS feed.

If anyone's interested in writing a tool like that, let me know. Otherwise, next time I'm twiddling my thumbs I'll try to throw it together. I've never dealt directly with the Cabal library, but there's a first time for everything. If someone else wants to write that tool and wants help sticking a web service on it, let me know.

Michael

[1] http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2010/10/enhanced-cabal-sdist.html _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

This would be a nice feature for the new hackage server: http://sparky.haskell.org:8080

Bas _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe