Since 2015, FP Complete has been developing Stack and its associated backend infrastructure, and have donated the hardware resources, time, and expertise needed to make the services available to the community. Stack and Stackage have enabled Haskell development workflows that were not possible before, and the careful attention paid to developer usability has been very clear. Additionally, the existence of a large, curated, compatible set of maintained packages has enabled tools such as Hoogle that need a globally-consistent view of packages to work predictably and reliably. Over the years, these tools and services have become critical infrastructure for the Haskell community.
Stack was enthusiastically received by the Haskell community, and it has essentially been a community project for some years now - most work is presently being done by Mike Pilgrem, who has no affiliation with FP Complete and is merely an enthusiastic user. But network services such as Stackage really require a sponsor in order to become a community resource. FP Complete has hosted all of the Stackage infrastructure for many years on our behalf - now they are donating it all to the Haskell Foundation. Hosting these services at the HF makes them more robust, as they’ll no longer be reliant on a single company.
We’re in the process of drawing up the concrete transition plans, but the transition will be complete by the end of 2023. If you would like to help out with the transition and with hosting, and you or your company have expertise in Kubernetes, and containerized deployments of Haskell Web applications, please get in touch with Bryan Richter, the HF’s DevOps engineer, at bryan@haskell.foundation. Bryan will be managing the transition together with board member Hazel Weakly, the Stackage Curators, and the FP Complete admin team.
Thank you, FP Complete, for your ongoing support and maintenance, and for trusting the HF as Stackage’s new home.