[Agda] Agda environment: Hackage, Hoogle, Haddock, Cabal?

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 03/24/2014 06:07 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> While Agda itself is great, the environment around it not so much. It's
> difficult to find libraries online that do what we need, it's hard to
> find the functions we need, we don't have much in the way of
> documentation except looking up the papers and source diving and we have
> no way to manage library versions etc.
> 
> Are there plans to assimilate tools with functionality of Hackage,
> Hoogle, Haddock and Cabal into the Agda environment? Hoogle would be
> pretty difficult to do for type signatures but it should be fairly easy
> to look for function names. I don't imagine a Haddock-like thing would
> be extremely hard to attach. A cabal-install thing would be awesome
> although I'm unsure how hard that would be. We could probably re-use all
> the Hackage code for an Agda version. Maybe we could even convince the
> Hackage/Cabal guys to spare some space for Agda packages which would be
> much easier than having to implement and host everything ourselves.
> 
> What do you guys think? Are there any plans already? Currently trying to
> find a library which does what you want involves a lot of looking for
> papers, then looking for (mostly dead) links to the code, e-mailing the
> author when the code is dead/doesn't work… It's quite a pain.
> 

I'd like to bump this thread a little. I have recently changed my distro
to NixOS which is based on the nix package manager and *just* managed to
package an Agda library using nix which pushes a cabal-like tool way
down in my personal priority. Now what remains are just convenient nix
functions and wrappers to make packaging and using these easier but the
bulk is done. So, if you use the nix package manager or plan to use it,
there may soon be Agda packages coming to the repository near you. I for
one am much more inclined to not only use but to write libraries if
there are means of managing them and making it easy for others to use.

It would still be nice to have a central Hackage-like place where code
lives of course but that seems like a much easier goal to achieve.

-- 
Mateusz K.