I wonder if “jobs” is the right category for a call for volunteers, but it kinda fits, doesn’t it?
I was approached by Stefano Zacchiroli from the Software Heritage project that archive all the source code (+ VCS history) that they can find for posterity. They archive Haskell code, but it’s currently “incidental”, in the sense that they encounter a lot of it via general-purpose forges such as GitHub, GitLab, as well as distributions such as Debian.
To make much more relevant Haskell code is archived, they would like to also systematically archive all Hackage packages. In addition to increase Haskell code coverage, that will also enable to archive package metadata properly. They could do it, but we prefer to delegate development of the needed (open source) adapters for Software Heritage to domain experts, and they have some funding for it.
He expects the needed development work to be fairly limited, as they already have adapters for other similar package repositories, so there will be a lot of code to be reused. So, dunno, maybe a couple of weeks to 1 month of work, including the time needed to get familiar with their software stack. Preferably the work should be done in Python, because after initial deployment they will need to maintain it ourselves, and they are not big enough to have developers fluent in all languages out there
This seems like a worthwhile goal, and I hope I can find someone here whose finger itch to get Hackage included in that archive. Is there?
See https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/swh-devel/2021-04/msg00035.html for information about the small grant, if funding plays a role. In either case, Zack will be able to answer questions at zack@upsilon.cc.