Dear Haskellers, I'd like to suggest one idea which is going on in my mind for quite some time... Recently the project where I am offering some help (gtk2hs) had to move part of its web site from SourceForge to haskell.org since SF site has some limits which we were not able to overcome. So, why not form HaskellForge and thereby form powerful Haskell alliance, ie. common site which can host many/most present Haskell projects offering appropriate web & other (eg. darcs) services? If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place. Ruby (which is not so long around, at least in the Western part) has RubyForge site which at the moment hosts 653 projects with 2159 registered users. Then there is also, Ruby Application Archive (RAA) with 1190 projects. Haskell community is a very friendly one and has lot of brain-power on disposal. Why not add some (more) organizational skills to make it even more friendlier place? Any comment? Sincerely, Gour -- Registered Linux User | #278493 GPG Public Key | 8C44EDCD
On 5/13/05, Gour <haskell_list@atmarama.org> wrote:
Dear Haskellers,
I'd like to suggest one idea which is going on in my mind for quite some time...
Recently the project where I am offering some help (gtk2hs) had to move part of its web site from SourceForge to haskell.org since SF site has some limits which we were not able to overcome.
So, why not form HaskellForge and thereby form powerful Haskell alliance, ie. common site which can host many/most present Haskell projects offering appropriate web & other (eg. darcs) services?
If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place.
Ruby (which is not so long around, at least in the Western part) has RubyForge site which at the moment hosts 653 projects with 2159 registered users.
Then there is also, Ruby Application Archive (RAA) with 1190 projects.
Haskell community is a very friendly one and has lot of brain-power on disposal. Why not add some (more) organizational skills to make it even more friendlier place?
Any comment?
I'm currently working on Hackage[1] plus its integration with Cabal, and extending it to include SourceForge-like features would definitely be desirable. It is, however, a one-man project so don't hold your breath. -- Friendly, Lemmih [1] http://haskell.galois.com/cgi-bin/hackage
On 5/17/05, Lemmih <lemmih@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/13/05, Gour <haskell_list@atmarama.org> wrote:
Dear Haskellers,
I'd like to suggest one idea which is going on in my mind for quite some time...
Recently the project where I am offering some help (gtk2hs) had to move part of its web site from SourceForge to haskell.org since SF site has some limits which we were not able to overcome.
So, why not form HaskellForge and thereby form powerful Haskell alliance, ie. common site which can host many/most present Haskell projects offering appropriate web & other (eg. darcs) services?
If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place.
Ruby (which is not so long around, at least in the Western part) has RubyForge site which at the moment hosts 653 projects with 2159 registered users.
Then there is also, Ruby Application Archive (RAA) with 1190 projects.
Haskell community is a very friendly one and has lot of brain-power on disposal. Why not add some (more) organizational skills to make it even more friendlier place?
Any comment?
I'm currently working on Hackage[1] plus its integration with Cabal, and extending it to include SourceForge-like features would definitely be desirable. It is, however, a one-man project so don't hold your breath.
Correction: I'm the only one who hacks on Hackage. Much of the design and administration is handled by Isaac Jones (aka SyntaxNinja). Apologies to anyone who might have contributed somehow without being credited. -- Friendly, Lemmih
Lemmih wrote:
I'm currently working on Hackage[1] plus its integration with Cabal, and extending it to include SourceForge-like features would definitely be desirable. It is, however, a one-man project so don't hold your breath.
I had a look at RubyForge, and it looks very much like a modified GForge (http://gforge.org/). Might this be an option for HaskellForge, too? Cheers, S.
On 5/21/05, Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@aedion.de> wrote:
Lemmih wrote:
I'm currently working on Hackage[1] plus its integration with Cabal, and extending it to include SourceForge-like features would definitely be desirable. It is, however, a one-man project so don't hold your breath.
I had a look at RubyForge, and it looks very much like a modified GForge (http://gforge.org/). Might this be an option for HaskellForge, too?
Someone would have to hack support for Darcs and HaskellDB in PHP and that someone will not be me. -- Friendly, Lemmih
Lemmih wrote:
On 5/21/05, Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@aedion.de> wrote:
I had a look at RubyForge, and it looks very much like a modified GForge (http://gforge.org/). Might this be an option for HaskellForge, too?
Someone would have to hack support for Darcs and HaskellDB in PHP and that someone will not be me.
I understand the need for Darcs, but why HaskellDB? Just curious... And I wonder how much effort that would be, anyway, compared to the rest of GForge. Cheers, S.
On 5/21/05, Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@aedion.de> wrote:
Lemmih wrote:
On 5/21/05, Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@aedion.de> wrote:
I had a look at RubyForge, and it looks very much like a modified GForge (http://gforge.org/). Might this be an option for HaskellForge, too?
Someone would have to hack support for Darcs and HaskellDB in PHP and that someone will not be me.
I understand the need for Darcs, but why HaskellDB? Just curious...
HaskellDB might not be necessary if GForge already has some way for clients to query the database.
And I wonder how much effort that would be, anyway, compared to the rest of GForge.
I agree that we could benefit from using GForce but we still have to find a guy willing to hack PHP. -- Friendly, Lemmih
On 5/13/05, Gour <haskell_list@atmarama.org> wrote:
So, why not form HaskellForge and thereby form powerful Haskell alliance, ie. common site which can host many/most present Haskell projects offering appropriate web & other (eg. darcs) services?
If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place.
On the other hand, I bet that the majority of developers here also develop software using languages other than Haskell. Further, if these people are like me, then I would want to keep all of my projects in the same place, regardless of implementation language. That is, I don't think that people would want to host their Haskell projects at HaskellForge, Java projects at Java.net, Ruby projects at RubyForge, etc. I think that these language-specific sites are best reserved for infrastructure projects like compilers and reusable libraries. For end-user applications like Darcs, which are useful to people outside the Haskell community, hosting on a language-specific site makes less sense. For example, what if Darcs was rewritten in C++ or ML? It would be the same application as far as its users are concerned (ignoring psychological issues) but it wouldn't fit at HaskellForge anymore. Or, less drastically, if someone were to develop a GUI for Darcs written in C++ (like TortoiseSVN) or in Java (an IDE plug-in), would these projects belong at HaskellForge? Based on this reasoning, I think that if the existing hosting sites are not sufficient to handle Haskell projects (e.g. because they don't support Darcs), then it would make more sense to work with an existing hosting site to improve Haskell support. Then, tools like Hackage could be designed to interoperate seamlessly with these existing hosting sites. If nothing else, it would be less work, and presumably the effort would benefit a larger group of people (not just Haskell advocates). Regards, Brian
Whoops, I sent this to just brian by mistake. On 21/05/05, Brian Smith <brianlsmith@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/13/05, Gour <haskell_list@atmarama.org> wrote:
So, why not form HaskellForge and thereby form powerful Haskell alliance, ie. common site which can host many/most present Haskell projects offering appropriate web & other (eg. darcs) services?
If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place.
On the other hand, I bet that the majority of developers here also develop software using languages other than Haskell. Further, if these people are like me, then I would want to keep all of my projects in the same place, regardless of implementation language. That is, I don't think that people would want to host their Haskell projects at HaskellForge, Java projects at Java.net, Ruby projects at RubyForge, etc. I think that these language-specific sites are best reserved for infrastructure projects like compilers and reusable libraries.
The thing is, Haskell people tend to want to use Darcs for their Haskell stuff, and I don't think there are sites like sourceforge supporting it yet...
Samuel Bronson wrote:
The thing is, Haskell people tend to want to use Darcs for their Haskell stuff, and I don't think there are sites like sourceforge supporting it yet...
So my question is (probably once again): Why can >100.000 projects live with SF and not the Haskell community? Although CVS is not my favourite version control system, I'd happily use it if I get the rest of SF for free then. I have the very strong feeling that we are experiencing a "not invented here" + "we can do it better" scenario... :-[ I see the need for Cabal/Hackage, but I am far from being convinced that building a SF-like site from scratch is the right way to go. Either collaborating with the SF people or modifying GForge looks more promising and economical to me. Cheers, S.
Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@aedion.de> writes:
So my question is (probably once again): Why can >100.000 projects live with SF and not the Haskell community? Although CVS is not my favourite version control system, I'd happily use it if I get the rest of SF for free then.
For Hackage, we probably need to think more by analogy with CTAN for TeX, and CPAN for perl, rather than SourceForge. These provide easily-accessed repositories of libraries in the relevant language. SourceForge is much more about applications than libraries in my view, and hence is language agnostic. (Although I imagine it may also currently be the nearest equivalent to CPAN for finding C language libraries.) Regards, Malcolm
On 26/05/05, Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@aedion.de> wrote:
Samuel Bronson wrote:
The thing is, Haskell people tend to want to use Darcs for their Haskell stuff, and I don't think there are sites like sourceforge supporting it yet...
So my question is (probably once again): Why can >100.000 projects live with SF and not the Haskell community? Although CVS is not my favourite version control system, I'd happily use it if I get the rest of SF for free then.
I have the very strong feeling that we are experiencing a "not invented here" + "we can do it better" scenario... :-[ I see the need for Cabal/Hackage, but I am far from being convinced that building a SF-like site from scratch is the right way to go. Either collaborating with the SF people or modifying GForge looks more promising and economical to me.
I think we might actually be suffering from the "invented here" syndrome, namely because we got early exposure to darcs and many of us got hooked. Just about every project I do goes into darcs pretty quick. I should make a script to make a directory and set up two repos named "base" and "work" under it, or maybe just set up one to copy around ;-). I'm sure most of us have used CVS and/or SVN with existing projects (or before darcs, or for things which need to run everywhere and not just where GHC runs), and some of us probably don't like darcs, but that doesn't mean others of us don't feel the need for darcs hosting. -- thought-I-had-sent-this-already-ly yrs, Sam
Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com> writes: (snip)
I think we might actually be suffering from the "invented here" syndrome, namely because we got early exposure to darcs and many of us got hooked.
I kinda disagree here. Haskell people were not using sourceforge way before we had Darcs :) It seems like there's a need for a self-organizing repository of libraries and tools. A CPAN-like Hackage might be enough, maybe we don't need a project hosting sight. peace, isaac
On 30/05/05, Isaac Jones <ijones@syntaxpolice.org> wrote:
Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com> writes:
(snip)
I think we might actually be suffering from the "invented here" syndrome, namely because we got early exposure to darcs and many of us got hooked.
I kinda disagree here. Haskell people were not using sourceforge way before we had Darcs :) (snip)
Huh, you have a point there.
Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com> writes:
I'm sure most of us have used CVS and/or SVN with existing projects (or before darcs, or for things which need to run everywhere and not just where GHC runs), and some of us probably don't like darcs, but that doesn't mean others of us don't feel the need for darcs hosting.
I can attest to this. I've been hosting various darcs repos and mirros for some people on #haskell. I had a GForge test installation on ScannedInAvian.org years ago. I hacked in darcs support by slightly modifying the ssh key submission to allow submission of GPG keys. It's easy to get an ugly but working solution. Thesis: The Haskell community needs a HaskellForge. Point: Users can't find libraries and their details. Counterpoint: Hackage will cover that for smaller projects. Supporting evidence: I recently asked someone why they chose OCaml over Haskell. They said it's because OCaml has a wider range of libraries, especially OpenGL and SDL bindings. I know that Haskell has both of those, but it would appear that he couldn't find them. Here's a regular scavenger hunt you can see in the #haskell logs. What's the difference between HOpenGL and OpenGL? Where are the docs? Which one is included with the ghc6 debs? I'm not picking on HOpenGL specifically, I can think of lots of projects where details are hard to find (my code too!). Some others that come to mind are SOEGraphics and Yampa / Yampa Arcade. Coming at it from the other direction, can you figure what projects are on haskell.org? How many project webpages can you find without Google? I think the biggest lack is a searchable index of packages and details. A HaskellForge would have a searchable index of projects, but so will Hackage. But, hackage and cabal are more like deb/rpm than sourceforge. Hackage will never cover mailing lists, forums, or bug/feature trackers. So, I guess it depends on what you think the Haskell community needs. -- It seems I've been living two lives. One life is a self-employed web developer In the other life, I'm shapr, functional programmer. | www.ScannedInAvian.com One of these lives has futures (and subcontinuations!)| --Shae Matijs Erisson
I think we are thinking about this the wrong way. We shouldn't be debating whether haskell needs a haskellforge, but discussing a _coding project_. I think darcs has some great features that can be used in a general source hosting site in novel ways, but the actual software to create the site is the interesting bit we should be deciding how to write. A HaskellForge for helping the haskell community with their projects would simply be one application of said software. but there is nothing keeping people from running it on their own personal, or another large communal site for non-haskell or private or whatever projects. Personally, I think such a project would be very interesting indepedently of whether it is used for a haskellforge or not. So, I think we should concentrate on 'HaskellForge: The OSS darcs based project hosting software' instead of 'HaskellForge: The web site'. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈
John Meacham (john@repetae.net) wrote: Hi John!
I think we are thinking about this the wrong way.
We shouldn't be debating whether haskell needs a haskellforge, but discussing a _coding project_.
As a one who start this discussion (although, after sending my 1st post I found out that HaskellForge was already discussed and Shae put a wiki entry and had a demo on ScannedInAvian.org...i.e. I was not the 1st one discussing the issue), my consideration is that we are mixing apples & oranges...
I think darcs has some great features that can be used in a general source hosting site in novel ways, but the actual software to create the site is the interesting bit we should be deciding how to write. A HaskellForge for helping the haskell community with their projects would simply be one application of said software. but there is nothing keeping people from running it on their own personal, or another large communal site for non-haskell or private or whatever projects.
What I had in mind when writing about HaskellForge is the same thing as Shae put in his post, i.e. "Thesis: The Haskell community needs a HaskellForge." based on personal experience when the gtk2hs project (where I'm offering my humble help) could not satisfy its reqs on SF site. HackageDB alternative is in the category of CPAN, CTAN sites, as already mentioned. otoh, Ruby community has both RubyForge and RAA. The two main Haskell gui libs (gtk2hs & wxhaskell) use SF, and (still) use CVS. The same with ghc - I understand that ghc is around much longer than darcs, and gtk2hs & wxhaskell being on SF cannot use darcs, but as Manuel put wrote nicely regarding ghc & darcs (darcs-users list): <quote> Is Darcs sufficient for fptools? If it is, the one reason to adopt it is because it is written in Haskell, and we like to promote Haskell. </quote> So, having HaskellForge site with darcs (& other services like Hackage) is a nice way to promote Haskell & build its community.
Personally, I think such a project would be very interesting indepedently of whether it is used for a haskellforge or not. So, I think we should concentrate on 'HaskellForge: The OSS darcs based project hosting software' instead of 'HaskellForge: The web site'.
otoh, it does not mean I'm against HaskellForge software - maybe it's better to call such project 'HForge' - but in the present situation HaskellForge does not depend on HForge, i.e. it could be (probably) possible to equip haskell.org site to provide everything to have HaskellForge (sounds practical) and it would serve only Haskell projects as in a present. Let us 1st show an example before jumping on the HForge. Sincerely, Gour -- Registered Linux User | #278493 GPG Public Key | 8C44EDCD
On 2005-06-01, Gour <list@atmarama.org> wrote:
The two main Haskell gui libs (gtk2hs & wxhaskell) use SF, and (still) use CVS. The same with ghc - I understand that ghc is around much longer than darcs, and gtk2hs & wxhaskell being on SF cannot use darcs, but as Manuel put wrote nicely regarding ghc & darcs (darcs-users list):
<quote> Is Darcs sufficient for fptools? If it is, the one reason to adopt it is because it is written in Haskell, and we like to promote Haskell. </quote>
So, having HaskellForge site with darcs (& other services like Hackage) is a nice way to promote Haskell & build its community.
That's a side benefit. When darcs is appropriate for a project, it is so so much nicer than CVS. -- Aaron Denney -><-
Am Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2005 08:29 schrieb Gour:
[...]
The two main Haskell gui libs (gtk2hs & wxhaskell) use SF, and (still) use CVS.
Has someone already mentioned that SourceForge.net plans to introduce Subversion support this year?
[...]
Best wishes, Wolfgang
On 5/25/05, Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com> wrote:
On 21/05/05, Brian Smith <brianlsmith@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/13/05, Gour <haskell_list@atmarama.org> wrote:
If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place.
On the other hand, I bet that the majority of developers here also develop software using languages other than Haskell. Further, if these people are like me, then I would want to keep all of my projects in the same place, regardless of implementation language. That is, I don't think that people would want to host their Haskell projects at HaskellForge, Java projects at Java.net, Ruby projects at RubyForge, etc. I think that these language-specific sites are best reserved for infrastructure projects like compilers and reusable libraries.
The thing is, Haskell people tend to want to use Darcs for their Haskell stuff, and I don't think there are sites like sourceforge supporting it yet...
I tried to address this in my original email. There are several hosting sites like Sourceforge around. Although it is unlikely that SF.NET can be pursuaded to integrate Darcs (Subversion support has been "investigated" for two years, I think), I bet an alternative site could be pursuaded to install Darcs support. If so, this would benefit all projects, not just Haskell-related ones. Also, if a new site had to be created specifically to provide Darcs hosting, then why limit it to Haskell projects?
On 26/05/05, Brian Smith <brianlsmith@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/25/05, Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com> wrote:
The thing is, Haskell people tend to want to use Darcs for their Haskell stuff, and I don't think there are sites like sourceforge supporting it yet...
I tried to address this in my original email. There are several hosting sites like Sourceforge around. Although it is unlikely that SF.NET can be pursuaded to integrate Darcs (Subversion support has been "investigated" for two years, I think), I bet an alternative site could be pursuaded to install Darcs support. If so, this would benefit all projects, not just Haskell-related ones.
That could be nice, if especially if they could set it up so that it was easy to set up submit-by-mail something like the Darcs repo has, with a list of GPG keys to auto-apply patches from.
Also, if a new site had to be created specifically to provide Darcs hosting, then why limit it to Haskell projects?
I was actually thinking this too. It really would be annoying to have Darcs hosting only for Haskell projects. So I guess I really would prefer that it be one of the existing SF alternatives. -- Sam
participants (12)
-
Aaron Denney -
Brian Smith -
Gour -
Gour -
Isaac Jones -
John Meacham -
Lemmih -
Malcolm Wallace -
Samuel Bronson -
Shae Matijs Erisson -
Sven Panne -
Wolfgang Jeltsch