Help Haskellers in Iran

#1

Hi Haskellers!
My name is Artin, I’m an Iraninan and I’ve been a Haskeller for about 17 months now. Haskell and purely functional programming changed the way I think about computation. From the moment I started to learn about it, there hasn’t been a single language that I’ve loved and wanted to see/help grow more than Haskell. Unfortunately, 2 days ago, I realized that I couldn’t open hackage, haskell wiki or cabal without a VPN (I get a 403 status code from hackage). But stackage, this site and hoogle still work. I don’t know the reason for it; I don’t know if this is another sanction upon us like Google’s developer platform or another censorship that is happening by Iranian government. Because of all the things that are happening in Iran right now, our internet connection is terrible at best and we are not even able to connect to a VPN.

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If this situations stays the same, there’s a chance that Iranian Haskellers, however small in quantity, wouldn’t be able to use their favorite programming language anymore. No matter how much I searched, I haven’t been able to find a single Haskell job in Iran; so I’m pretty much sure that all of us are using/contributing to Haskell in our free time.
Yesterday I was reading @simonpj 's post about Haskell Community and I agreed with every single of one them. If there’s a single thing you can do about this situation, me and other Iranian Haskellers would appreciate it more than you think.

Thank you,
Artin

10 Likes
#2

I can tell you that wiki.haskell.org and hackage.haskell.org (which Cabal uses) are on Fastly. That would explain why those two might have disappeared but not the others. Good luck!

2 Likes
#3

According to https://hackage.haskell.org/mirrors.json, there are two official mirrors for hackage at the moment:

You can substitute hackage.haskell.org in your cabal config file and see if the mirrors above is reachable.

Feel free to drop me a personal message to discuss anything that’s offtopic for this site, wish you all the best.

1 Like
#5

Thank you, the second mirror is banning me and the first one is resulting in “premature end of compressed stream”. Even if this works, the FPcomplete’s website is stating that they are not hosting any documentation which still means not being able to look at library documentation.

#6

You can bypass the fastly proxy to hackage by accessing hackage-origin dot h dot org (expand out url the obvious way)

This also works in your cabal configuration settings file.

(you can also bypass the downloads proxy by hitting downloads-packet-origin dot h dot org and the wiki at wiki-packet-origin dot h dot org)

I’d ask that folks that don’t really need these don’t use them, as they’ll be somewhat slower without the caching, and also if used pervasively could eat a lot more host bandwidth and resources.

3 Likes
#7

Thanks for helping out! Unfortunately, only the homepage comes up and I’m unable to see any library documentation.

#8

Salaam,

I am of Afghan origin in US. I hope you are successful in finding a way around this problem! There might be a few Iranians in the US who are Haskell enthusiasts. I can’t remember if I have met any.

Kanishka

1 Like
#9

salaaaam,

Thanks for your kind words! I’m still trying to find a way but haven’t found anything yet. I’d be really happy to have connections with them if you any of them. I wish you the best in every part of your life. I know that Afghans, just like Iranians are now experiencing their darkest times. I hope we all get another chance to have a good life in our country.

4 Likes
#10

But can you download/install packages (after modifying url: in your ~/.cabal/config)? Hoogle and docs can be had locally (if a bit awkwardly). Keep us updated!

1 Like
#11

Sadly, I still can’t download packages. On objects-us-east I get a 403 status and on FPcomplete, I get Codec.Compression.Zlib: premature end of compressed data stream. I’ve deleted the package index twice and tried to update via cabal update but nothing seems to work. If there’s any workaround for the documentation problem, I’d be grateful if you could share it with me.

2 Likes
#12

If you can share a list of libraries you need, I’d be happy to gzip them up and Magic Wormhole them to you.

1 Like
#13

I’m out of words! Thank you! Thankfully, I have all the necessary libraries for my current project. But if I couldn’t find a solution to this situation, I’d be more than happy to get in touch with you. Thanks again for the kind words.

#14

I’m Incredibly happy to say that I’m able to access hackage, Haskell wiki and cabal again! I owe a big thank you to everyone who tried to help. Thanks again.

7 Likes