As most of you know by now, at FP Complete we’ve just launched the beta of the FP Haskell Center, our integrated development and deployment environment. We’ve been letting people onto the system over the past few weeks. For those of you waiting for your beta invitation, you can get a more immediate idea of what we’re offering by viewing the screencast. But in this blog post, I want to talk about some of the work that’s going on behind the scenes, what it means for our users, and how it will benefit the greater Haskell community.

Not interested in my analysis of the problems, and just want to hear how we’ll solve them? Feel free to skip ahead.

Current issues

The set of functionality that we’ve included in our product has not been randomly thrown together. Gregg has spent a lot of time talking with people with existing Haskell setups to ascertain the major pain points, and we’ve tailored our offering to solve as many of those problems as possible.

You’ve already seen a few of our solutions: an integrated development environment paired with an application deployment server, an interactive learning system, and a higher emphasis on user-friendly documentation and code samples. I’d like to talk right now about a different set of issues we’re trying to solve, a set that probably isn’t so obvious at first glance.

Dependency conflicts (“Cabal hell”)

Almost anyone who has been using Haskell for any length of time has run into some kind of library dependency conflict. These situations often get labeled as “Cabal hell,” but to be fair the issue is rarely related to Cabal itself. Managing dependencies between many different libraries is a difficult task. This isn’t Haskell specific; these problems exist in other languages as well.

Nonetheless, getting a set of packages built and coexisting that can all be used simultaneously can be a daunting task, and is something we want to provide a solution to.

Libraries are fast-moving targets

One of the great strengths of the Haskell community is the tendency to solve problems the right way. If a problem is found with an existing approach, the default response tends to be to fix the library, even if it means a breaking change. This leads to fast iteration and high quality libraries. The downside is it can be a pain to stay on top of the latest version of all libraries. (And related to the previous point, it can be difficult to get all downstream dependencies to update to the newest version of an upstream package.)

The solution for end users could be to just stick with old versions of libraries. That, however, brings us to our next point.

Lack of bugfixes for older releases

Virtually every package on Hackage is volunteer maintained. It is difficult enough to maintain a single version of your library. Maintaining older versions as well can be overwhelming. But that’s exactly what people need: stable versions of libraries which still receive backported bugfixes. This is commonplace in many parts of the software world, both open and closed source. We simply haven’t gotten to that point in the Haskell world yet.

Non-trivial to get started

Assuming you could solve all the other problems listed, getting set up to start coding can be non-trivial. You need to install your tool chain correctly, which presents a number of questions:

  1. Do you use your distribution’s copy of GHC, or install your own copy?
  2. Do you use the Haskell Platform, or just cabal install all your dependencies?
  3. Should you use plain cabal, cabal-dev, or hsenv?

And you’ll almost certainly need to perform some task for which you don’t know which library is the right library. How do you determine which one to use? How do you know that it will be compatible with the rest of your library set?

Our vision for customers

We’ve thought long and hard about how to make Haskell an easier language to get up-and-running with, and have started putting together a vision for our customers. Let me share this vision, and then nail down the concrete steps we’ll take to get to that point.

Stable libraries

Since the launch of the School of Haskell, we’ve provided a large and growing set of libraries on our servers. This library set is going to be available for all of our IDE users as well. The important thing to note is that at no point did you have to manually install any packages. System libraries are available, dependencies installed, and conflicting versions resolved.

The final component which is missing is stability. Currently, our libraries update on a regular basis. We will be taking snapshots of this library set and providing them as options to our users. We will only include bug fixes into these libraries as necessary. This will provide users with the ability to start developing software and not worry that they’ll have to rewrite their code to stay up-to-date with security and bug fixes.

Bleeding edge for those who want it

While we will recommend these stable libraries for most users, we will continue to offer our bleeding-edge library set as well. This will allow users to try out the newest versions of libraries. This will also allow our system to remain as inclusive as possible. Anyone who wants to get a new library into our system just needs to send a pull request, and at our next bleeding-edge build, the library will be available. And any packages that make it into our bleeding edge will also be snapshotted at our next stable library build.

Note that there are a few reasons why a library may not be included on our system even after a pull request. The most obvious is if the package doesn’t build. But more subtle issues are licensing concerns, security flaws, or naming conflicts with existing code. These situations are rare, however, and can usually be worked around easily.

Recommendations/tutorials (for those who need it)

While we try to provide as many packages as possible in our environments, we’re also aware that this much choice can be overwhelming. Therefore, we will be selecting some libraries to be our recommended solutions to some problem domains. The purpose here is not to tell seasoned Haskellers how to write their code. Instead, we want new users to have a simple path to follow from “I have a problem” to “I have a solution.”

In addition to the recommended library list, we will be providing two other advantages to sticking with our recommended libraries: a higher level of customer support (including bug fixing), and more training material on using these libraries.

How we get there

You know the problems we want to solve, and you know how we want the solutions to look. The question remaining is how to implement them.

Stackage

The most publicly-visible work we’ve done towards solving the problems listed has been the Stackage project. Stackage is a project aiming to make it possible to build stable, vetted sets of packages. You can read more about the project and its goals in the Stackage release announcement.

For a while I’ve wanted to share more details about how we’re using Stackage and how I see it fitting into the existing ecosystem, but I’ve waited until things of settled down and the answer could be reliable. Fortunately we’re at that point now.

Stackage is really two things in one:

  1. A set of tools for building and testing a set of libraries.
  2. A community driven ecosystem for creating a list of libraries that should be installable together, and the communication infrastructure for letting package authors know when there’s a problem.

We use Stackage internally to build all of our package databases. Stackage itself, however, is not such a database. Said another way, Stackage is not a competitor to something like Debian’s Haskell packages; instead, Stackage is a tool that could be used to build the Debian package set. Stackage is also not a competitor to the Haskell Platform; the HP is a set of vetted and reviewed packages. Stackage is a community process that allows any package to be included, and only cares about the coexistence.

Just as a member of the Haskell community and a package maintainer, I think Stackage has been a big success. There are currently over 400 packages built by Stackage. Numerous bugs and incompatibilities have been reported back to upstream maintainers, giving maintainers more prompt and reliable feedback, and improving the quality of packages across the board for Haskellers. If Stackage did nothing more than it does today, I think it would have earned its keep.

But I do hope to see it continue improving. I’ve discussed having Stackage used as part of the distribution maintainer toolset in the past, and while those conversations have stalled, I hope they resume. I also hope the community gets more involved. At the time of writing, there are 5292 packages available on Hackage. I’d like to see more of them included in Stackage, so if you maintain any Hackage packages that aren’t on Stackage, I encourage you to submit them.

Working with upstream

My work on Stackage has put me in a position to interact quite regularly with upstream package maintainers. I want to clarify exactly how we’ll be interacting with the community.

Monitor security problems

We take security very seriously, and are constantly taking measures to improve the security of our toolset. One problematic area is the fact that Hackage allows anyone to upload any package, without any warnings. While this will be solved by Hackage 2, we are currently vulnerable.

For the past month, I’ve started monitoring the package upload logs, and signaling alerts when a new uploader uploads a package for the first time. For example, if Alice uploads the package alice-package, and Bob uploads a new version a few days later, I’ll get a warning and contact Alice. (And internally, we won’t build any new library sets until the problem has been resolved.)

I think this kind of review is vital to keeping the Haskell ecosystem safe. So if you get an email from me about this, you’ll know why.

Report bugs

We automatically run test suites each time we perform a Stackage build, which has uncovered a number of regressions in upstream packages. We file these reports upstream as soon as possible, and (due to the wonderful nature of the Haskell community) bugs tend to be fixed very quickly.

As our user base grows, we anticipate more bug reports coming from our users. We’re looking forward to working with upstream providers to get these bugs triaged and fixed. And as part of our stable library plans, we have infrastructure in place to maintain patchsets against older versions of packages, to simplify the task of backporting fixes.

Notify of outdated dependencies

The most common interaction we have with the community has been to notify of outdated dependencies. Since Stackage has started, the number of emails I send about this topic has decreased drastically. I’m sure there are many factors at play here, but I see this as a sign that the Haskell ecosystem is beginning to stabilize. Previously, it was to be expected that breaking releases would happen on a regular basis. In the past six months, I’ve seen this happen very infrequently for any of the most heavily used packages.

Identify possible library improvements

As we get user feedback about libraries, we hope to share this information with the rest of the community. Some sample feedback we expect to be sharing is:

  1. Tasks that could be made easier in a library with some convenience functions.
  2. Places where documentation (especially tutorials) are lacking.
  3. Functionality which simply isn’t covered by existing packages.

Internal work at FP Complete

Our main goal at FP Complete will be to continue building and polishing our end user tools. It’s my sincere belief that by providing these resources, we can drastically boost Haskell’s adoption, which will have a profound effect on the Haskell community.

In addition, we intend to take part in community efforts. Our main focus has been on the documentation front. The School of Haskell was entirely about improving the documentation infrastructure for the community. Our recent announcement of tutorial and code sample contests is designed to get high quality tutorials produced as quickly as possible.

For the most part, we have not felt the need to participate very much in the production of libraries. The open source community has done a fantastic job at creating a large, high-quality library ecosystem. However, as we build up libraries for our own purposes, or identify gaps in the existing library ecosystem, we intend to get involved: in the former case, releasing our code to the community, and in the latter, either working with community members to produce a suitable library, or providing one ourselves.

Unified product vision

I hope the above discussion gives a good idea of how we’re hoping to work with the community to make everyone’s lives better. I just want to close with a summarized view of what our upcoming product (the FP Haskell Center) will be providing to users.

  1. IDE: fully loaded with the tools you need
  2. Libraries: no need to configure or build, just start coding
  3. Tutorials tie in for easy learning on the job
  4. Develop and deploy from the cloud

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