On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 7:50 AM Sean Leather wrote:

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 3:42 AM, Alan & Kim Zimmerman wrote:

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I had a chat with Duncan Coutts of Well-Typed about the possibility of an extension to hackage which would allow private packages to be uploaded and managed by hackage, for a fee.

The idea is that it operates in a similar fashion to GitHub, where public packages are free, but there is a monthly fee for hosting private packages. This would give commercial organisations wanting to get started with Haskell a simple way to host their packages, so that members of the organisation could see the private and public packages when logged in, and cabal install would work as expected with the superset.

Duncan is worried about the up-front effort required vs an uncertain return.

Personally I think that this could be a good way to fund the hackage infrastructure.

So the question is, apart from me, would anyone be interested in such a feature?

There are several of us a bit to the north of you, Alan, that would fully support this.

How about teaching cabal how to fetch packages directly from SCM? Organizations already have SCM systems set up, and the package metadata (.cabal file) is already in there.

On 03/09/15 09:39, Tomas Carnecky wrote:

How about teaching cabal how to fetch packages directly from SCM? Organizations already have SCM systems set up, and the package metadata (.cabal file) is already in there.

stack already does it iirc.

On September 3, 2015 at 12:42:48 AM, Roman Cheplyaka (roma@ro-che.info) wrote:

This raises the question of who hackage belongs to.

Historically hackage has been a public service with no-one in particular behind it. Well-Typed volunteered to work on it occasionally, but there wasn't a sense of ownership or responsibility. (At least that was how it looked to me.)

This has not been true for a long time. Hackage 1.0 was maintained by Ross Paterson for many years. It was first written by Lemmih in 2004 (http://marc.info/?l=haskell&m=120492314116236) and developed and maintained as a community project. Some of the people at well-typed who have worked on it, such as Duncan, were working on it well before “well-typed” even existed. After the formation of the haskell.org committee and the consolidation of our infrastructure it became the responsibility of the haskell.org committee, and of the infrastructure team. As the current hackage homepage still notes, “hackage 2.0” was funded in large part through support of the Industrial Haskell Group. Additionally, work took place through GSoC projects. More ongoing work has been accomplished through subsequent GSoCs as well, including this year. Hackage remains maintained, as with other community infrastructure, by the haskell infrastructure administrative team, with ultimate responsibility resting with the haskell.org committee. That said, I personally have no opinion on such a service, but since I am at ICFP as is Alan, I look forward to discussing it in person :-) Cheers, Gershom

Perhaps we can discuss this further in person during the Symposium, but at first glance I am strongly opposed to adding this sort of paid service to Hackage under the Haskell.org umbrella. I share Duncan's doubts that the amount of money brought in would offset the amount of time spent implementing, maintaining, and supporting even just this feature, not to mention the fact that this would surely complicate development and maintenance of the open-source side of Hackage. This approach also exacerbates the wart of cabal-install's interdependency with hackage.haskell.org. I would much prefer to see a commercial vendor, perhaps Well-Typed or FPComplete, able to spin up proprietary Hackages as a service for commercial users, and for those Hackages to integrate well with hackage.haskell.org. That there is enthusiasm for this idea shows that there might be a viable commercial idea here, but Haskell.org is not the home for it. Adam On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 8:04 AM, Alan & Kim Zimmerman wrote:

At Signal Vine, we've already developed the infrastructure around

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hosting and building packages, but otherwise I would consider using such a service depending on what features it provides and how well it fits out process (and how much it costs, obviously). Bare hackage with private packages wouldn't cut it; if it did, we'd just run our own hackage server.

My thinking actually started with possibly running our own hackage server, but then you have to allocate a machine and take time/skills to administer it. So if a service like this is available at a similar or lower cost it starts to make sense.

It also lowers the bar for commercial take-up, by sending a signal that commercial users are supported, and allowing "toe-in-the water" commercial projects at low upfront cost.

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Roman

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. I would much prefer to see a commercial vendor, perhaps Well-Typed or

FPComplete, able to spin up proprietary Hackages as a service for commercial users, and for those Hackages to integrate well with hackage.haskell.org

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.

I can very well imagine commercial users not wanting to use a repo owned/run by what might be a competitor.

I think there are different kinds of commercial users, some of us just want to use it for internal projects so there is no conflict. In terms of distracting from the core mission of haskell.org, I can understand the viewpoint. Personally I do not mind who provides such a service so long as it plays well with hackage. I wanted to start the discussion wrt haskell.org so it can go forward in a neutral way. Alan