hackage-download - Download all of Hackage

Script to download all of Hackage. Either --latest versions or --all historical versions.

Usage

./hackage-download.py --latest

./hackage-download.py --all

Both drop each package into the current directory.

Performance

./hackage-download.py --latest finishes in 77 seconds on my desktop with Gigabit Internet.

• 13 seconds are cabal list --simple
• 10 seconds is the downloading of 13981 latest .tar.gz packages (900 MB)
• 54 seconds is the un-gzipping on my spinning disk (4.4 GB)

Interesting facts

cabal get is insanely slow

80x slower than my parallel wget:

cabal list --simple | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort -u | parallel -j100 --load 10 cabal get {}
12535.05s user 566.04s system 276% cpu 1:19:03.51 total

This is with cabal 2.2.0.0.

Minimalist one-liner

Downloading latest packages, with GNU parallel to render a progress bar:

cabal list --simple | python3 -c 'from fileinput import *; [print("https://hackage.haskell.org/package/"+p+"/"+p+"-"+ver+".tar.gz") for (p,ver) in sorted(dict(map(str.split, input())).items())]' | time parallel --bar -P 100 -n 32 wget --quiet {}

Some packages mess with you

• Some packages from cabal list --simple fail to download from Hackage, e.g. with 410 Gone or other errors.
• Some .tar.gz packages set funny permissions on the unpacked files which makes removing them a bit of a nuisance.
• Some .tar.gz packages have "trailing garbage", resulting in decrompression warnings.
• As a result, the script must do lenient error handling, and will not report correctly on e.g. disk write errors.