Hackathon 2016

This is a page to collect ideas for Cabal/Hackage hacking tasks/mini-projects for the Haskell eXchange Hackathon 2016. It is an updated version of a similar page for the 2015 infrastructure hackathon.

Please use the #hackage IRC channel on freenode for online discussions.

Feel free to expand individual bullet points into full (linked) pages or tickets/issues.

Strategically important projects

Mostly Cabal Hell and related.

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• Package collections in cabal-install and hackage-server

  The idea here is to support package collections directly in our infrastructure. Currently package collections like Stackage are implemented indirectly by specially crafted cabal.config/cabal.project.freeze files. Collections are also to be distributed via hackage, allowing anyone to define and distribute collections.

  A specification was posted to the libraries list recently. There is also some prototype code available for cabal-install. The cabal-install code adds solver support and allows for set-like operations on collections. Nothing has been started yet for hackage-server.

  This is an important feature since package collections are one of the two big solutions to cabal hell. This is not a huge project. There's probably enough for two people to work on the client side and two on the server side.

Link to https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22meta%3A+easy%22

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• Improve cabal new-build TODO: Update this section

  This is the other major plank in the solution to cabal hell. This is not a neat self-contained project. There are lots of parts to this project and it will require people to work together.

  TODO: better intro, link Edward's blog post Link to https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22cabal-install%3A+nix-local-build%22

  • Get the new-clean PR into shape
  • Building on top of the cabal new-build code to support cabal {run,test,bench} etc.
  • 'cabal new-haddock' (link to relevant ticket)
  • A link to Galois meta tracking ticket https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3577
  • UX design for user-wide environments ('cabal new-install') https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3737
  • UX design for 'cabal new-update' (index freezing by default, interaction with cabal.project.freeze) https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3832
  • 'cabal new-install' for binaries
  • Test Duncan's ghc-environments PR (use GHC 8.0.2 snapshot)
  • https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3883
  • https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3741
  • https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3730 (related to GHC environments, see extra-packages feature)
  • https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3401 (deprecate sdist hooks, use stack code as reference, but use Cabal's file globs)
  • Integration tests for new-build (e.g.: new-build everything on Stackage) https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3322
  • Go through the remaining issues in https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3104 (difficulty: moderate)
  • Add support for git/darcs/... dependencies https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/2189 (makes sense to start with tarballs)

• Cabal documentation.

  Cabal's user guide [got quite a bit better

• Rewrite of the .cabal file parser. #2865

  @phadej (Oleg Grenrus) is the person to talk to about this issue. Help him with merging, experiment with using the new parser instead of the old one, write tests.

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• New AST for .cabal files (not an easy one!).

  Builds on the new parser.

  See http://code.haskell.org/~duncan/cabal-ast-experiment/

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• Include-able Common Stanzas #2832

  Builds on the new parser+AST. Allow to reduce duplication by moving common definitions to include-able common stanzas which can then be included from other stanzas.